


MicroStark Enterprises

by qwanderer



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Crack Played Straight, Grief/Mourning, M/M, tiny tony
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-29
Updated: 2021-02-19
Packaged: 2021-03-04 02:08:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 26,489
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24985855
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/qwanderer/pseuds/qwanderer
Summary: Loki stood straight up and looked down his nose at Tony as he said, slowly and deliberately, “It is the job of the royal family of Asgard to protect the Realms. No matter whether they welcome that protection.”Tony side-eyed him. “Sounds like something your brother would say on one of his more bullheaded days.”Loki shot Tony a venomous glare.
Relationships: Loki/Tony Stark
Comments: 63
Kudos: 167





	1. Taken Down a Peg

**Author's Note:**

> Iris Lefay Longbottom:
> 
> Years ago I got an idea for this story, using the common trope of tiny Tony, but treating his predicament as realistically, seriously, and characteristically as possible, not just as crack or fluff. (Though the result has plenty of both!) I especially wanted to see how Tony would bring his brilliance and creativity to bear on the physical and mechanical problems that arose, and how the team would support him. I imagined Tony seizing on the opportunity to work on nanotechnology. Tiny Tony is not just a figure of fun; he has dignity and agency. I never actually got around to writing anything down, though.
> 
> Recently Qwanderer (I'm Q's mom) asked me what I would like xem to write for me, and I chose this. Qwanderer is a perfect collaborator, being really good at technobabble, and also good at FrostIron (I wanted a good dollop of FrostIron), and brilliant at witty dialog in general. The words are mostly Q's, but a lot of the ideas are mine.
> 
> -[Iris Lefay Longbottom](https://www.fanfiction.net/u/401598/Iris-Lefay-Longbottom)
> 
> qwanderer:
> 
> There are always a lot of influences from other fics on my stories and it’s impossible to pin down and name all of them every time, but recently I reread (for the zillionth time) infiniteeight’s excellent phlint fic [Let Them Call It Mischief](https://archiveofourown.org/works/537637), and realized in a lot of ways it’s served as my blueprint for many “Loki gets in a snit and does weird magic and everyone has to deal with it” stories, including this one. infiniteeight does it so well. 
> 
> Iris doesn’t have an account here, but you’re much more likely to see her haunting the comments section than me! We’d love to hear more ideas for ways Tony could potentially adapt his tiny habitat to his needs. We’ve got a pretty solid three-chapter (edit: four-chapter [oh no, it's five now!]) outline, but there’s always space for another nifty idea or two.  
> -q

Loki was… a good resource, or at least that’s how they’d sold the arrangement to SHIELD. In reality, he was a lot more than that, both good and bad. A risk. A pain in the ass. A _really great_ resource. Not hard on the eyes. 

And sometimes, just sometimes, Tony caught his eye at a tense moment and thought,  _ this guy gets it. _

* * *

The two didn’t always see eye to eye.

They’d forgone the chains on the first day. Loki had escaped from Asgard, so what chance did they have of holding him here, at least without gaining his cooperation to learn more about him and his abilities? But Loki was officially allowed to stay here only with the understanding that he would not engage in hostilities and he would provide intelligence where he could. 

Some days working with Loki was fun, working together to figure out how to translate alien concepts into human terms. Sometimes getting information out of Loki was like herding cats. 

Okay, maybe a lot of the time it was both.

This morning, Loki seemed fairly at ease, crossing his ankles where they were stretched out on Tony’s black leather workshop sofa. “What questions do you have for me today?” he asked.

Tony downed his espresso, then tapped the cup against his empty hand, thinking about what the next topic should be. “Space travel,” he decided. He set the cup down and paced his way behind the sofa. “So Jane’s the expert on the whole controlled Einstein-Rosen bridge phenomenon, but you’ve gotta have ships too, right? FTL drives? So tell me what you know about those.”

“No.”

“What?” Tony looked at Loki, whose expression had gone sour while he wasn’t looking.

“It’s a simple enough answer to understand, is it not?” Loki continued, when Tony just looked at him. “No. I will not.”

Usually Loki’s evasions were more nuanced than this. This gave Tony nothing to work with, nothing to do but outright ask. “Okay, why, though? This is… this is the stuff we need, you know that, right? This is why you’re here.”

Loki shook his head and wouldn’t look at Tony. “You are not ready.”

“We’ve been through this,” Tony said, thinking he recognized the argument this time. “If I haven’t got the basic elements you need to explain it, then give me the basic elements first. As long as it gets us there, I want to learn.”

Loki leapt to his feet. “That’s not it. Not this time. You would understand it. But you are not ready for it.”

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” Tony yelled back.

“You have no concept of the danger you would be facing! There are those out in the galaxy who you cannot hope to stand against.  _ You are not ready!” _

Tony’s face went hard. “You don’t get to decide that.”

Loki stood straight up and looked down his nose at Tony as he said, slowly and deliberately, “It is the job of the royal family of Asgard to protect the Realms. No matter whether they welcome that protection.”

Tony side-eyed him. “Sounds like something your brother would say on one of his more bullheaded days.”

Loki shot Tony a venomous glare. 

Tony raised his hands as if in surrender. “I’m just saying. You don’t usually get all ‘Aesir are superior’ like this, that’s more his thing.”

Loki sniffed. “This is different.”

“I don’t get it,” Tony said, eyes wide and more than a little wild. “It’s exactly the same kind of stuff I’ve been asking you for for weeks.”

“It’s not.” Loki huffed in frustration. “There is technology to defend Earth and to protect humans, and there is technology that will put you at greater risk!”

“In case you haven’t noticed,” Tony said. “Risk is kinda what I do. Someone always tries to find a way to knock me down and I’ve always found a way to stand back up. I’m not known to cower in the face of threats.”

Loki laughed darkly, shaking his head. “You won’t always be able to get back up and stand tall. The universe is not so kind.”

“Then I’ll deal with that. But I don’t run and hide because a problem is too big.”

“Is that so?” Loki said, his tone low and dangerous. He made a gesture, and suddenly he stood much taller over Tony. About a hundred feet tall, in fact. 

Tony crossed his arms and rolled his eyes. “You don’t scare me, Lokes,” he yelled up at the looming figure.

Loki scoffed, nearly knocking Tony over with the toe of his boot. “Nothing does! But some things should!”

And Loki vanished.

* * *

It was only after Loki disappeared that Tony fully registered his surroundings. 

At first he thought he wasn’t in the workshop anymore. He was in a place with a lot more empty space, and hugely high ceilings. But then he heard Jarvis’s voice, and everything clicked back into perspective. 

“Damn it, Loki!” he screamed at the empty air. “This isn’t funny!”

Tony was exactly where he had been before. It was just that he was now four inches tall.

“Sir,” Jarvis said again. “Please verify your status. I may be experiencing a glitch.”

“No, J, you’re not,” Tony said, sighing, “I’ve been munchkinized.” He took a few steps, looking around. He wanted more coffee. The coffee machine, however, was about as accessible as Mount Everest.

“Ah,” said Jarvis. 

“I’m assuming it’s not the kind of transformation you’d get with Pym particles,” Tony said, resigning himself to his current level of caffeination. “No breathing apparatus, and I don’t feel like I’m asphyxiating from being at the wrong scale relative to the air. I mean, it could still be an illusion. Could be right about that glitch, just Loki gave us both the same one.”

“I recommend that we ask one of the other Avengers to give us their observations,” Jarvis suggested. 

Tony winced. “Let’s not call the others just yet, okay? It’s just an embarrassing little hiccup in the research. Shouldn’t have pushed my luck. I’m sorry, Loki, okay?”

There was no answer from the alien.

“I have checked my own inputs, to the extent that I am able,” Jarvis noted. “Shall we test yours?”

Tony paced what normally would have been the length of his workshop, and then he paced it again, in a straight line, and he still didn’t hit a wall. He found a stray bit of wire on the floor and picked it up, testing it in his hands, bending it slightly. Then he rubbed at his eyes. “If this is an illusion,” he said, “it’s not just visual. It’s got all the bells and whistles. And it’s consistent with what it seems to be so far. For practical purposes, I’ve gotta treat it like it’s real, right? Can’t trust my senses to get me out if it’s not.”

“We’ll proceed on that assumption,” Jarvis agreed. “Your vitals are in their normal ranges for a stressful situation. The reactor is within its operational parameters and your blood oxygen level is steady. You do seem to be processing oxygen appropriately.”

Tony shrugged. “Which, yeah, doesn’t seem possible. But. You know. Magic.” He said the last word with a bite to it that reflected the many times Loki had been unable to explain something in scientific terms and had resorted to using the word. “Doesn’t mean anything! Still exists. Guess we’re gonna try and crack it one more time.”

“We have scanned for every type of energy we have the equipment to detect while Loki is spellcasting,” Jarvis reminded him. “We have yet to find the mechanisms involved.”

“Yeah, well, let’s give it one more go, all right?” Tony said rather pointedly. “Let’s just get every scanner we have pointed at me. Heck, maybe we’ll find something else useful.”

They had Dum-E move all the spectrometers and similar equipment down to floor level, as this was deemed safer than asking Dum-E to lift Tony up to the workbench where they usually sat. They ran every scan they could think of, from the highest gain to the finest grain and in every range they could detect.

They did not find anything useful.

“Really?” Tony asked, his tone just this side of petulant. “Nothing’s different? Nothing at all?”

“There is reduced output from the reactor, but that would be expected with such a drastic reduction in scale,” Jarvis replied.

“Okay,” Tony said, sighing. “So forget energy. Let’s look at what this change is on a basic physical level. Then maybe we can work backwards to find out what the bastard did. What do we know?”

“Your molecules seem to be in scale with the surrounding air. I assume the same is true for other substances, although I would not suggest you test that by eating or drinking until we have further confirmation. We don’t know what other effects your change in size may have had on your cellular structure, for example.”

“Huh.” Tony stroked his beard with a thumb. “So wait. Am I made of less cells? Jarvis, can we test that without taking a goddamn tissue sample? I don’t have a lot of tissue to spare right now.”

“Might I suggest an examination of the surface of the tongue?” Jarvis suggested after a brief pause. “The papillae which contain the taste buds have a complex cellular structure, and any change there may indicate how the transformation affected you on a cellular level.”

“So you want me to stick my tongue out for the camera?” Tony asked, chuckling.

Dum-E startled Tony by dropping a small wrench, and nudging it towards him.

A very small, freshly chromed, very shiny wrench.

“Hey, good call,” Tony said, and hefted it until it was leaning up against the nearby machinery. “Probably simpler.” He stuck his tongue out and studied his reflection with an assessing eye.

“That’s… weird,” he said, and looked again. “Yeah, they’re bigger. Or. I guess. Not as much smaller as the rest of me.” Tony wrinkled his nose at his slightly distorted reflection. “Loki didn’t shrink me, he rebuilt me as an eight-bit sprite.”

“It would seem so,” Jarvis agreed. 

Tony started pacing as he thought this new information through. “I mean. Magic, yeah, I don’t get it. But apparently _it_ gets _me._ Because however he did this, he’d need to account for biological mechanisms I don’t even get. He’d have to understand, like, _really understand_ the reactor, the human body, all that jazz.” He stopped, stood, and rolled his eyes. “Showoff,” he muttered to the empty air.

“There is no way to reverse this with our current level of technology,” Jarvis concluded.

“Right.” Tony huffed in frustration. “If that’s the point you were trying to make, you’ve made it!”

From the dark echoing corners of the workshop, there was silence.

“Come on!” Tony called back to them.

And still, Loki failed to reappear.

After a few more moments of pointed silence, Jarvis said, “I think it may be time to notify the other Avengers.”

“Uh-uh.” Tony shook his head. “They don’t need to know about this.”

“I disagree. At the very least, the Avengers need to be informed that Iron Man is currently out of commission.”

Tony thought about it. If they were called out, yeah, they’d be assuming Iron Man would be joining them. But he couldn’t work the suits like this. Goddamnit, it was true. If he knew he wasn’t going to be able to join them and hadn’t told them, he’d get an earful. From most of them.

“Okay,” Tony said, “give ‘em a shout.”

* * *

Tony tolerated being carried carefully in Steve's cupped hands like some kind of rare butterfly without protest, only because protesting would have made the scene ten times more undignified. 

Steve stepped out of the elevator and then paused, looking around the common room with his usual threat-assessment glare.

“Nothing here’s gonna eat me,” Tony said. 

“I’m not sure where would be the safest place,” Steve said.

“Table's fine,” Tony said pointedly, and when that didn’t work, he half-yelled, “Put me  _ down _ , Steve!”

Steve lowered his hands with exaggerated care. Tony was used to balancing himself on an uneven, moving platform – the boot rockets gave him a rougher ride on the regular, honestly! This was nothing.

Once he'd landed on his own feet again, he straightened his clothes and paced the length of the table under his own power, just to remind everyone that he could.

The other Avengers sat at their usual places at the table, and between Thor and Steve unapologetically peering at him like they were both trying to complete a jigsaw puzzle, and Clint and Bruce trying to hide their own peering gazes, Tony felt like he was in front of a particularly eager group of reporters. At least Natasha had her poker face down pat. 

So Tony paced the length of the table, and put on his press-face for his friends. Which he didn’t like having to do.  _ But. Well. Here we are. _

He took a breath. Then he spread his arms, displaying the current situation.

“So,” he said. “This happened.”

“Loki did this, you mean,” Clint commented. “You piss him off?”

Tony breathed in through his teeth. “Okay, I may have antagonized Loki a little. But!” He raised one finger for emphasis. “We’ve developed a rapport. I pushed a bit. I knew he wasn’t going to do anything to permanently harm me.”

“You don’t consider this harm?” Steve asked, gesturing illustratively.

Tony glared. “I don’t consider this permanent.” 

“So you have some way of reversing it?” Steve asked.

“Not… currently,” Tony said, grimacing just slightly.

“Jarvis?” Bruce asked.

“We have no paradigm for this,” Jarvis elaborated, like the traitor he was. “We would not know where to begin.”

Steve crossed his arms, frowning thoughtfully. He turned. “Thor,” he asked, “what’s your take on this?”

“I have little knowledge about this type of magic,” Thor told them.

“But you know Loki, right?” Tony said. “He’s gonna be around. He’ll want to see how this plays out. Right? Back me up here.”

Thor sighed. “If there is anything I am sure of about my brother, it is his ability to surprise me.”

“That. That is a cop-out.” Tony pointed an accusatory finger at him.

“It is the truth.”

“Okay, but you know something about magic, right?” Bruce asked him. “It couldn’t hurt to fill us in.”

“Perhaps not,” Thor said. “But it will take time, and I doubt it will provide the answers you seek.”

“Still. Hit me with it,” Tony said.

They spent a little while going over what Thor knew about magic, and yeah, it was all stuff that Loki had told him, but less useful. Much less exact, and without all the grounding in Midgardian science and terminology that Loki had gained over the course of their partnership.

Would it be accurate to call it a partnership?

Tony thought so. But then, most of his partnerships had been fraught, in one way or another. He and Pepper were currently on the outs. Working with Bruce on the Helicarrier had been fun, although that particular jam session hadn’t ended… ideally. And, well, Yinsen….

Tony decided not to think about that anymore.

“Okay,” he said. “So. We’re spinning our wheels there. Let’s give it a rest.”

“So what _is_ the next strategy?” Natasha asked.

Tony pushed a breath out through his nose, and looked around at the team. “Listen. Loki didn’t want to hurt me. That wasn’t the kind of fight it was. Okay? He’ll be back.”

“And if he’s not?”

Natasha really wasn’t pulling her punches, here.

“He’d better be,” Tony muttered, not quite to himself. Then he raised his voice, telling the room in general, “I have things to do. We have things to do! Loki! Get your ass back here and stop trying to avoid the question.”

“You know he may not be here, right?” Bruce said, and at least his tone was gentle.

Tony set his jaw. “He’s listening,” he insisted. “He’ll be back once this stops being funny to him.”

Clint swiveled sideways in his swivel chair, looking at Tony sidelong. “Or, he’s half a galaxy away and isn’t giving you a second thought. His world doesn’t exactly revolve around _this_ world.”

Tony shrugged. “Guy was adopted, right? You never know, maybe there _is_ life on the moon, after all.”

Well, at least he got a bit of a chuckle out of Bruce with that one.

No reaction from the lab partner he was  _ trying  _ to get a rise out of, though.

“Well, fact is, if he’s here, he’s not talking,” Clint pointed out.

There was a brief moment of silence as they all contemplated that indisputable fact.

Tony surveyed his team, who were looking various degrees of frustrated or worried, or even - fuck, was that _pity_ on Steve’s face?

Tony scoffed. “Get that look off your face, Rogers. This is  _ not permanent.”  _

Bruce cleared his throat. “Okay, for the moment let’s set aside the question of what’s going to happen in the long term. What are we doing in the short term?”

“Yelling at Loki, apparently,” Clint said. When this got him a variety of disbelieving looks, he elaborated, “I mean, I would too. I’m just saying.”

Natasha rolled her eyes.

“So what kinds of things can we do for Tony in the short term?” Steve asked. “What is he going to need?”

Bruce looked to Tony. “I assume you’ve determined that it’s safe for you to breathe and otherwise consume normally scaled substances?”

“Signs point to yes,” Tony said. “This wasn’t a hostile act.” 

“I think that’s a little beside the point right now,” Natasha said. “It _is_ impacting your ability to function. So. Plan?” She turned to Bruce.

“No matter how long this goes on,” Bruce said, looking steadily at Tony as he spoke, “we need to operate as if this is more than a blip on your radar because we can’t be sure that that’s all it is. Even if Loki comes back tomorrow and undoes this? You’re going to need things your size for the night. Food, shelter. Basic facilities.”

“So we’re building a dollhouse?” Clint asked, an unreadable look in his eyes.

“Shut your mouth, Barton,” Tony said.

“No. I mean.” He looked at Natasha, who nodded. “I have some stuff we could use.”

It turned out that Barton had an entire toy chest in his apartment, full of building materials. Lego and Lincoln Logs and a few other useful odds and ends. They seemed to belong as much to Natasha as to Clint, who stopped to look at her every time they had to permanently alter something to use it.

Clint got to play with the power drill, drilling holes in the logs so they could be wired together and not bring the house down on Tony if it got so much as nudged while he was in it.

Steve watched the building take shape, and then he poked around in the toy chest himself, taking out one of the larger building blocks. “Would it be all right if I carved something?” he asked.

“Knock yourself out,” Natasha said. “You do woodwork?”

“Yeah, whittling is something I picked up and kept at,” he said as he took out a knife. “I liked being able to make something useful. I thought about making furniture for a while, but. Well. There are a lot of kinds of art I would have done, except it’s easiest to scrounge up paper and pencils when you haven’t got enough for food.”

Bruce had gone to his apartment to grab his tablet, and when he returned, he had a plush bedroom slipper. Tony tilted his head to one side and looked at it as Bruce put it on the table. “Okay,” he said. “That’s definitely not going to fit.”

Bruce poked the soft sole. “Memory foam,” he said. “They were a gift, I haven’t worn them. It’d probably make a decent mattress.”

“I don’t sleep,” Tony said.

“I know,” Bruce responded ruefully, and put the slipper inside one of the suite of rooms Clint was building.

Thor, fascinated by the Lego, had been experimenting with the different pieces and the way they fit together. It was becoming clear that he was beginning to construct a grand hall, which served to transition between the small world of Tony’s Lincoln Log villa and the larger world of the Avengers’ dining table. 

Steve looked up from the block he was carving, which was now visibly becoming a chair, and ran his eyes over the floor plan that was beginning to take shape.

“You should put some railings up on the edges of the table,” he suggested to Thor. “Make it a little less likely for Tony to fall.”

Tony wanted to scoff at the idea - he’d done the math in his head, and at his current mass, the force of an impact with the wood floor would be almost negligible.

Again, he took worse in the armor all the time.

On the other hand, it would be kind of nice to have a railing. Something to lean up against, make it feel like a castle wall instead of a freaking gigantic dining room table. That just made him feel like he was on the menu. 

Tony collaborated with Thor on the height and structure of the railing, and Steve continued to assess the progress they’d made. The cabin Clint was building was near one end of the table, and Thor’s vestibule reached out from there to well short of the center of the table, leaving plenty of room for the others to sit.

“How are we going to create a functioning bathroom, though?” Steve asked.

“Leave that to me,” Bruce said. He didn’t elaborate. Instead he jotted down notes on his tablet.

Tony gave a quiet sigh of relief that his sanitary needs weren’t going to be micromanaged by this particular committee.

“What about dishes? Silverware?” Steve persisted. 

“Titanium printer,” Tony said. “Might as well use it, since I have it.”

He had the setup to print precision medical-grade titanium parts, of course, because of the arc reactor. It also came in handy for the suits. And right now, for a very scaled-down version of tableware.

Bruce made sure all the others were off collecting materials or had their heads down on their current tasks before he showed Tony the basic plans for the washroom, propping Tony’s phone up against the reinforced Lincoln Log wall of his new sitting room. 

Tony was undeniably grateful for this. He was used to his life being a three ring circus open to the paying public, but he appreciated any privacy he could manage to hang on to here.

He gave the design a once-over and also appreciated that it had no windows. Light came in through the top panel, which was a thick sheet of frosted acrylic. 

Most of the plumbing parts were also printed titanium - if you were going to print titanium, it didn’t take much more in the way of resources to print several items, at this kind of scale. Tony paid attention to this part, as he realized that he was going to have to be the one to apply the teflon tape and assemble the pieces of the plumbing system. 

One washbasin sat on the outside wall of the unit, so that he could use it for more public tasks, like washing all his new titanium dishes. By hand. Without a dishwasher.

Okay, this whole thing was more than a little annoying.

As for the – ahem – disposal system, Bruce had made sure to keep things extra simple, because, as his notes mentioned, there are no tiny plumbers and there are some things you just don’t want to have to deal with at three in the morning when you’re just up to have a piss.

Then there was the actual bathing area.

The hot air dryer was nice. While Tony had been installing the pipes in the printed plastic framework of the room, Bruce had taken the guts out of a hair dryer and used some of the heating element and other parts to make a whole-room heating and ventilation system. He’d used a couple of CPU fans instead of the hair dryer fan, since they were quieter and made Tony feel a little less like he was standing in a wind tunnel whenever it was turned on.

The printed plastic structure included a very generous bathtub. One of the sides was corrugated so it could be used as a washboard. Tony scoffed at it when he first saw it in the plans, but Bruce had insisted.

Surely there was another way. Surely he wouldn’t need to wash his clothes in the tub like a medieval peasant.

But better safe than sorry, he supposed. Although that was much more a Bruce sentiment than a Tony one.

Speaking of which.

Apparently when Bruce had run the titanium printer, he hadn’t just made the plumbing parts and dishes and basic silverware. He’d made a few pots and pans, some basic cooking utensils, a pair of kitchen shears, and a needle. 

Tony grumbled about it all being completely unnecessary, but he still sharpened up the knives, scissors and needle on a now-gigantic whetstone, just in case.

When Natasha returned, she had a finely woven silk scarf, some cardboard and a few cotton balls, as well as a sewing kit and a roll of duct tape.

“Ooh, what’cha makin’?” Tony asked, looking curiously at the items.

“Wooden furniture is pretty,” she said, “but I know how much more likely you are to sleep if you have a comfortable sofa near where you’re working.”

“True,” Tony admitted. 

The construction of the sofa turned out to involve a lot of trial and error. Natasha’s first attempt was nice looking, admittedly, but when Tony tested it out, it did not pass the comfort test. They tried a couple more configurations. And as it turned out, Tony was the only one with small enough hands to make sure the stuffing went in evenly and the stitches were done neatly enough to make a really comfortable piece of furniture. 

He hated that Bruce had been right about the needle.

Then he took what was left of the scarf and started some matching curtains. “Just for the look of it,” he told the others, but he knew he’d get tired of any one of them being able to lean down and peek in his windows whenever they wanted. 

“Have you eaten yet today?” Bruce asked, frowning.

“Maybe?” Tony answered, honestly not able to remember whether he’d eaten breakfast before he’d gone down to the lab that morning. “But hey, I probably don’t need much. In fact! Just make me one of those smoothies, stick it full of drinking straws and freeze it. I can eat a straw full a day, that’ll last me months at this scale.” He cringed. “Not that it’ll need to.”

“That’s not a terrible idea,” said Bruce, “but we’ll be eating dinner right here most days anyway. You can eat real food with us.”

“For once,” Clint teased.

Tony narrowed his eyes. “This is a plot,” he told them all. “You set me up.”

“You picked the dining table,” Steve reminded him.

They got Chinese food, and Tony sat at his hand-carved table with his titanium dinnerware while the others sat around him, and he ate the tiny scraps of meat and vegetables and the two grains of rice that filled up his plate and needed to be cut to fit inside his mouth.

You know what’s surreal? Eating a slice of rice.

After dinner, Tony poked around on his phone, considering different designs for very small appliances. He supposed he could make a different kind of dishwasher, considering his dishes were all made of titanium and wouldn’t mind getting knocked around a little. 

It wasn’t a boring challenge, at least, but he really wanted to get back to work on his regular projects. His suits. So once they had the basics in place, Tony fiddled with the bells and whistles of his ridiculous little house more to kill time than anything else. 

He slept a little bit, restlessly. The slipper really was comfy, especially with the remaining end of Natasha’s scarf wrapped around him, but it was just too weird. At least the couch felt like a couch. So he dozed there, when he could make himself sit still.

The morning went by like mud. The others checked in, asked if he needed anything, but the novelty of his size had apparently worn off, as they no longer seemed inclined to hover. So Tony adjusted the settings on his phone, wrote a script to decrease the size of his on-screen keyboard, and poked at the projects he could make progress on digitally.

But he was an engineer. A mechanic. He built stuff. Right now he couldn’t build his stuff. So all he could really do was wait.

And he waited.

And waited.

By the second evening Tony’s clothes were pretty rank, and he was forced to admit that they were nowhere near engineering a full set of small appliances, and the washboard was going to come in handy.

He didn’t like to think of all the places Bruce had been where people didn’t have all these luxuries he’d taken for granted himself before Afghanistan, but right now he was grateful for the man’s flexible knowledge of what constituted “basic facilities.”

So he used the damn washboard. And he tried really hard not to think about the last time he’d been leaning over a tub of water.

He only had the clothes he’d been wearing when Loki changed him, and a fairly shapeless bathrobe Bruce made for him out of an old tee shirt. At least it was a nice tee shirt. Soft cotton in a rich dark red. A little coarse at this scale, but. He wasn’t in a position to be picky.

He hung his clothes up to dry and turned on the hot air dryer. At least that part was properly automated. He sat on his couch, and propped his phone up in the right position to be a proper big-screen TV. 

It wasn’t the same without a remote, though. He gave up on flipping through channels and just kind of sat scowling at the screen. 

Everyone had left him to his own devices now that they were reassured he had everything he needed to be comfortable.

Which would be great, if Tony could do his work. 

As it was, this was just a very annoying vacation.

“Are you enjoying this?” he yelled at the empty air. “I hope you like the Home Shopping Network!”

Loki didn’t respond. 

For the first time, Tony let himself consider the possibility that the alien really wasn’t around anymore.

And that was just an awful thought. So he settled himself into a really good sulk.


	2. Taming the Wilderness

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know it's been a while - I got busy - but we're back with more! Hopefully it won't be quite so long between updates next time.
> 
> -q

Marathoning Star Trek had seemed like a good idea at the time. It was at least marginally distracting from all the things Tony wanted to be doing but couldn't. 

Except for, you know, the whole central question of human space travel and all the cultural clashes that could result. Especially when aliens started getting uppity about knowing what was best for humans.

He didn't realize how badly the themes had been getting under his skin until he was halfway through season 2 of The Next Generation and Q was making a terrible nuisance of himself.

You know. Doing magic tricks. Helping the humans only when it suited him. Going on about how unprepared the humans were to face the Things Out There. Leaving the heroes stranded in an untenable situation just to make his point. 

Fucking magic aliens. 

The worst part was, Tony remembered how this episode ended. And he didn't want to hear it. Not now.

_ "You wanted to frighten us," _ Picard said from the phone screen. _ "We're frightened." _

Tony stood up and paced the length of the minuscule room.

_ "You wanted to show us that we were inadequate. For the moment… I grant that." _

Tony strode up to the screen, feeling the urge to punch or shoot something. 

_ "You wanted me to say I need you? I n-" _

Tony slapped his hand against the screen, pausing the video, and told Captain Picard's frozen face, "Fuck that." He swiped Netflix off the screen and brought up an empty schematic file. "I'm gonna build something."

* * *

He'd already worked on his previous projects as far as he could without practical builds and testing. He needed new projects. A new paradigm, really.

Being a four inch tall engineer was gonna be a whole different ball game.

The first problem he brainstormed was transportation. Because there was no way in hell he was going to get carried around by Steve any more than necessary. But he was going to need to move between his desks and work surfaces and the floor.

Obviously if he could have any system he could build, he'd make what amounted to a tiny suit, but anything that complex would have to wait until he had the setup to build it. So he thought of things he could cobble together fairly quickly with available parts, and put in a couple of orders with the appropriate suppliers.

The digital interfaces he could begin to adjust, but getting them tuned into his new size was going to take some trial and error. That would have to wait until he was situated.

When the team next called him out to his receiving room for dinner, he realized he'd been working for a long stretch and he felt grimy, but his hunger was more urgent than laundry or even a bath. He missed the ability to throw on a fresh tee shirt to quickly feel a little more human and put together. But there weren't really any clothiers who could make things that were comfortable and practical for his current form (Bruce's commendable effort with the bathrobe notwithstanding).

He realized he was going to have to make that happen himself, too, and began to turn over the advantages and disadvantages of various materials and manufacturing processes. Silk was a good fiber at this scale, as evidenced by Natasha's scarf being comfortable enough to sleep on, but for work clothes, Tony was going to need something more tightly woven and robust. 

Which meant building some kind of loom.

"You're quiet," Natasha commented after he'd spent half the meal eating automatically and staring into the distance as his plans took shape. "Should we be worried?"

"Oh, we should always be worried when Tony's quiet," Clint said. "The question is whether we should be worried about him, or about what he's planning."

"Definitely what I'm planning," Tony said with a smirk, feeling upbeat about his situation for the first time since it had befallen him. 

"Hmm," Bruce said. "Care to let your team in on those plans?"

"Nah," Tony answered.

"That doesn't help with the being worried part," said Steve.

Tony waved away his concerns. "I'll tell you tomorrow. Gotta work out a few more kinks first." And he turned his attention to finishing the tiny nubbin of beef and slice of green bean that had been carefully placed on his plate. The crumb of potato was gone, and soon all he had left was a small pile of peppercorn fragments that were each larger than a whole peppercorn would have been, relatively speaking. He'd only needed to bite into one of them once to discover that they needed to be removed, like bay leaves.

He excused himself to his cabin, hearing his teammates' voices boom distantly around him as he went about the business of washing himself and his clothes.

It felt a little invasive, that constant reminder that they were out there, surrounding him, but he was getting used to it.

In fact, as he settled beside the bathtub, watching it fill, the tangible reminder of their presence was comforting. 

Finding himself kneeling in front of a tub of water still wasn't pleasant, but it was something he was becoming more and more able to face.

As he got more comfortable with the bathtub, the water became less of a threat and more something fascinating to observe. He'd discovered that before he added any soap or detergent, the surface tension was a huge factor in how it behaved. It had its own shape in a way he wasn't used to, its own set of forms it preferred. It had a kind of grace to it that Tony had only ever come close to seeing in Miyazaki films. 

The association made the water seem like a calmer, friendlier thing. 

He put in the soap and watched how it dispersed in the water, and how the shapes of the water changed in response. 

A lot of stuff sloshed around in his brain as he sloshed his clothes around in the bathtub. How scale changed engineering in ways more profound than he might have imagined. How materials had their own shapes and personalities when you met them at somewhere closer to their own level. 

And then he started getting ideas.

By the time he was back in front of his phone screen, he had a dozen new projects swimming around in his mind, and he took down notes and sketched ideas out frantically, needing to get the horde out of his head and into his servers, so he could sort and prioritize and start to focus in on them individually. He found himself itching to get back down into the workshop, but this time, not for the work he’d had to leave behind. Instead it was the new things that drew his imagination, the stuff he could only really get his hands into now that each of his palms measured tiny fractions of an inch.

He was definitely going to make a new bot, for one thing. Probably several.

* * *

He ended up working late, and sleeping through breakfast, which meant that when he did roll out of bed (or rather, slipper), there was no coffee to be had.

“Come on,” he complained to Jarvis. “Have them save me a cup next time. It’s not like they’d really miss those last three drops.”

“Sir, believe me when I say that the dregs would not have been up to your standards,” Jarvis replied.

Tony grumbled his agreement and added a tiny coffee maker to his project list, high priority.

* * *

At lunch, he learned that Thor had gone off-planet to see if he could track down more information either about his brother’s location or the magic he’d used, but the rest of the team was there, and Tony decided that it was as good a time as any to announce his intention to return to the workshop. 

"All right," he said as he finished his food, striding out across the length of the table and looking around at his team. "Here's the deal. I'm going back to the workshop. Got things to do and I want to get to them."

"That doesn't seem like the best idea," Natasha said. 

"Yeah, I don't…" Clint began, and then frowned. "I mean, I get it, you wanna get back out there, but… what's that gonna look like? What are you going to be working on down there?"

Bruce, who knew his work the best, shook his head. "You know you can’t just pick up where you left off. Even if you had my help, I don't know your work well enough to step in where you'd need a pair of hands."

"Don't worry, Brucey," Tony reassured him. "That's not what I had in mind."

Steve made a thoughtful noise. "So, have you got any more leads on how to deal with this? Turn yourself back?" He frowned. "Is that what you’re going to be working on?"

Bruce pressed his lips together in worry. "Any kind of experimentation with increasing physical size with current human technology is way too risky, believe me. You’d better not be thinking about trying to…" Bruce gestured to himself, expressing the general idea without words.

Steve looked between the two of them for a moment before seeming to register what Bruce meant. "You mean… No, Tony." He shook his head decisively. "It's too dangerous."

Tony scoffed. "Yeah, and you both are in the perfect position to judge someone for considering taking an experimental super soldier serum."

"Is that what you’re planning?" Natasha asked, sounding merely curious.

"No, I don’t have quite that much of a martyr complex," Tony said, and he could feel the breeze caused by the sighs of relief around him. He looked at his teammates and tried his best to sound earnest. "I’m living and breathing and believe me, yes I do know how lucky I am that that’s true after all the shit I’ve stepped in the middle of in my life."

"So both Loki’s help and the Serum are off the table, and you're not planning on relying on another pair of hands," Steve summarized. "So how are you planning to deal with this?"

"Hey. Folks. News flash." Tony crossed his arms. "This is what me 'dealing with this' looks like. I freak out, I sulk." He rolled his eyes. "Yes, I’m admitting it. Then I face the music and do whatever I have to do to get back up and out there on my own terms. Even if that means having to deal with a whole new set of rules."

Steve frowned in confusion. "You’re not going to try to get back to normal."

Tony cocked his head to the side as he considered that. "Started from scratch so many times now I don’t think I’d recognize normal if it bit me on the ass," he told the giants around him who really should know this about him by now. "You know how I did that? Not focusing on what I can’t do. Figuring out what I can do. And doing that." 

"So you’re going to, what, be a four-inch tall engineer?" Clint asked skeptically.

"Yeah, you have a problem with that?" Tony responded.

“I guess not?” Clint said, eyebrows drawing together. “I mean, I don’t get it, but sure.”

“Really? Come on. I thought you were faking the whole bird brain schtick most of the time. Anyone else? I can’t be the only one here who’s wished they had smaller hands once in a while.”

He clamped down on the memory that tried to arise, swallowing hard, trying not to think of Pepper’s slim, competent hands reaching inside his chest and helping rebuild his metallic heart. He’d just been getting okay with how terrifying that had been when she’d broken his heart this last time. 

“Yeah,” Bruce said, drawing his attention back out to the team. His fingers brushed the specialized wristwatch he always wore, despite its taking a beating now and again. “I can see the advantages.”

Natasha’s mouth quirked at the corner in a tiny, bittersweet smile. “Some things might be easier,” she agreed. “Most things will be harder.”

“What did I just say about starting from scratch?” Tony admonished. “Not gonna stop me.”

Steve shook his head. "It’s too dangerous." 

Tony gave a large, expressive shrug. "I don’t know what you want from me here! I waited and you told me I should be figuring something out. I’m figuring something out and now you’re telling me I shouldn’t be? I’m not going to give up on living my life!"

"Of course not," Bruce said, throwing a pointed glance at Steve. "That’s not what we’re saying."

"So what are you saying, Bruce?" Tony asked. 

"We’re saying we have… concerns," Bruce said, "and we want to make sure to plan this carefully and address some of those concerns."

"Like what?" Tony asked.

There was a bit of an awkward silence until Clint said, "Listen, I don’t wanna be the person who killed Tony Stark by stepping on you and squashing you like a bug. That’s more Loki’s kind of game."

Tony rolled his eyes. "Oh, come on." Loki had clearly been putting on a show when he'd said that. 

"No, really," Bruce said. "I think it would be prudent if we had a way of locating you visibly at all times."

"You want a neon sign floating over my head that says ‘Tony Stark is here’?” Tony groused.

"Using the data stream from your arc reactor and the holographic projectors in the workshop," Jarvis commented, "that would not be difficult to implement." 

Tony threw up his hands. “Oh, come ON! J! Whose side are you on?"

"Frankly, Sir," Jarvis said dryly, "I am on the side of those who seem determined to account for your safety."

Scrunching up his face, Tony stalked back towards his house a few inches.

"Tell you what, Tony," Bruce said. "The neon sign can say whatever you want it to say. As long as it lets us know where you are."

"Ugh," Tony muttered, knowing they were right, but not wanting to admit it. "Okay, fair."

"All right," said Steve. "That's one concern out of the way. But how are you going to get around?"

Jarvis took that opportune moment to say, "Sir, you have a delivery."

"That the order I think it is?" Tony asked.

"Indeed, Sir," Jarvis confirmed.

"Then I think your answer should be in the lobby," he told Steve. "Why don't you go take a look?"

Steve went to investigate, a serious frown on his face. When he came back, Steve’s eyes were wide and round. Tony could suddenly picture exactly the kind of kid he’d been. 

He sat down so he could lean in and peer at Tony. It was difficult not to want to back away from the gigantic figure, but it helped that Steve was still radiating boyish wonder. “You're going to fill your whole workshop with a layout of HO-scale model trains.”

Tony smirked. “That's the idea. I'm hoping you're not a purist because a four percent grade is really the only way to go here, from a practical perspective.”

“I'm not about to argue. This is your workshop, it's something you're planning to use to get around. Of course you'd want to use the steepest functional grade, this isn't representational, it's practical.” 

“So you've got some experience with this kind of equipment.” Tony had had an inkling that that might be the case.

“Not nearly as much as I'd like,” Steve answered, shaking his head a little. “I talked trains with other kids in the thirties, Bucky and I dreamed about having a set of our own, but we never could. We got to see some, once or twice, but we were never allowed to touch. I didn't even know they were still around. So not a lot of first-hand experience.”

“You're about to have a whole lot more,” Tony told him.

“You want me to help build this?”

Seeing Steve's face when he realized that was somewhat akin to looking directly at the sun.

“‘Course I do. If I had the right size arms, well, this wouldn't be a thing, first of all. So you're probably the best person for the job.” He side-eyed Steve a little. “Especially if it means you’re going to stop complaining about the plan.”

Steve stopped and thought about that for a moment before nodding seriously. “Yeah, this? This makes sense. This is something we can help you with if anything goes wrong. You’re gonna let us help you, right? Not shut us out as soon as this is set up?”

Tony scoffed. “Well, yeah. Contrary to popular belief, I don’t actually have a death wish.”

There were some eye rolls at that. The only person who seemed to take that comment seriously was Bruce, who caught his eye to give him a tiny, sad smile, and then moved the conversation on by saying, “So what’s this going to look like, exactly?”

“Funny you should ask,” said Tony. “Been working on the layout.” He sent the plans from his phone up to the common room’s TV, so the team could all study them.

“That’s a lot of support structure,” Steve said. “Before we can even start setting up the rails. Even if I were a real carpenter, which I’m not, this job is too big for just one person.”

Tony was perfectly happy to have as much help from the team as he could get on this one. Well, he wasn’t sure about the guy with impulse control issues and a huge hammer, but Thor was still offworld, so that was a moot point.

“Oh, fine,” he said, pretending to give in. “Brucey and the assassin wonder twins can help too.”

* * *

So Tony was carried, along with the most important sections of his house, down to his workshop again. 

“I guess you won’t be around for dinner anymore,” Steve commented as he carried his own weight in model train equipment out of the elevator. “Since you’ll be living down here.”

“In a more literal sense than he already was,” Bruce agreed. “It’s been nice, having you around more.”

There might have been a little bit of a jab in there about Tony spending more of his time recently picking Loki’s brain, and less with Bruce’s. They were equally fascinating, if in different ways. 

“Hell,” said Tony. “I’ve already got, like, five big houses. What’s another tiny one? Tell you what, I’ll build another one for down here, and this charming little vacation cabin can go back up where it was.”

“Tiny houses are on trend,” Clint responded with a chuckle.

As they came through the workshop doors and Natasha set Tony down on the desk, a wireframe orange construction sign popped up above Tony’s head, reading, “Genius at work.” Tony craned his head a little to look at it, then nodded. “Not bad, J,” he said. “You’re forgiven.”

“As always, sir,” Jarvis sassed, “that was my ultimate concern.”

* * *

Even now that he was back in his workshop with a plan, things weren’t going smoothly. The gestural software was having trouble reading his movements, and making displays small enough for him to work with. He could fine-tune it in time, but it was going to require a lot of undignified trial and error and potentially hopping around on his keyboard, so he decided to save that for when his workshop wasn’t crawling with Avengers trying to build him the tiniest commuter rail in the world. And everything he could really plan out on his phone, he’d already done in the last few days.

After the third time the team yelled at him for micromanaging the construction, Tony used a pen to pry his top desk drawer open and investigate its contents out of sheer boredom. They were mostly junk, but sometimes all you had to work with was junk. Story of Tony’s life. Well. Certain pivotal parts of it, at least. 

He hefted out the broken laser pointer, a few paper clips, nuts, bolts and washers, and the set of electronics microtools with now hilariously oversized handles, and he started taking apart the laser pointer.

And, yeah. Maybe he could do something with this.

He got Dum-E to fetch him some parts, among them some fine coated copper wire and a couple of Lego pieces. 

So Tony was only vaguely aware that the team had needed to do some improvising, and that at some point Jarvis had sent Steve to the nearest hobby shop for a few more pieces. That was, until he noticed Steve standing over his desk, looking thoughtfully at the house and the utilitarian train platform that had sprung up next to it. 

“What’cha thinking, Cap?” he asked.

“I’m thinking your neighborhood could use some landscaping,” Steve replied.

“Ohh no,” said Tony, stalking over to Steve and shaking his head. “You are _ not  _ covering my desk with felt trees and tiny stop signs or whatever other cutesy shit you saw at that store. That would just be sad.”

Steve just smiled a bit mischievously and said, “I’m not making any promises.”

Tony realized the guy might actually be having a little too much fun with this, but he also didn’t have the heart to actually stop him. So instead, he just stuck out his tongue.

* * *

Once the train pieces were all in place, Tony was itching to test them out and refamiliarize himself with his workshop, but the controls weren’t fully set up, and would need to be tied into the workshop control systems and Jarvis to actually be useful. So when the team left to order some well-deserved pizza, Tony got to work on recalibrating the gestural software in the shop.

At some point, someone quiet (probably either Bruce or Natasha) had come down to lay a tiny titanium plate with a tiny triangle of the thinnest part of a thin-crust pizza on his dining table. Jarvis, as usual, coaxed him into eating without his really having to switch gears, so he only really noticed it when he got a bite of bizarrely thick, yet perfectly toasty pizza. He gave it a double take, then said “Not bad,” and took another bite. 

* * *

He was just fine-tuning the control algorithms when the assemble alarm went off. 

Tony stood up to go for his suit before he remembered he didn't currently have operational armor that he could pilot. "Ah,  _ shit," _ he said, and sat back down in front of his phone to set up some live feeds of the area. 

All he could do was give observations and advice, and he tried to do so without distracting his teammates. But it was so damn frustrating, watching and seeing where he would have gone if he'd had armor and not being able to interrupt when the team was all focused on the challenges in front of them. 

He hadn't really sat down and drafted anything in terms of getting back in his armor. He'd had ideas, of course, tons of them. He'd been focused on getting his workshop to a place where he could actually build precision machinery again, first. But seeing his team fight without him really lit a fire under his ass, and he started drawing up blueprints as he watched. 

It was a minor villain, someone new on the scene, and although there were a few dicey moments, the Avengers did just fine without Iron Man.

His absence did not go unnoticed.

Handling the media could wait, Tony told himself. Rhodey's call couldn't. Tony hit the button to take the call. "Hey," he said.

"Where were you, man?" Rhodey asked without prefacing it with a greeting.

"Look, it's a little hard to explain," Tony said. "You should come over."

"But you're okay, right? You're not dying again or anything."

"'Anything' is a really broad term," Tony hedged.

There was a noise that Tony interpreted as Rhodey sucking air through his teeth, and then he said, "Right. I'm on my way. Anything you need?"

"Coffee," Tony said. "You should definitely stop for coffee."

"Uh huh," Rhodey responded. "Think I'll come take stock of the situation. Then, maybe a coffee run. If you can convince me it's really mission critical."

Tony scoffed. "Why even ask?" he wondered to himself, as Rhodey had already hung up.

* * *

At least Rhodey managed to keep from laughing until after he’d asked Tony the important questions.

“So you’re healthy?” he asked, peering down at the tiny inventor. “This is sustainable?”

“Far as we can tell,” Tony confirmed.

“You’re just.” Rhodey pressed his lips together. “Three inches tall.”

“Excuse me! Four!”

After that, any commentary Rhodey might have had was lost to waves of helpless laughter. He sat down in Tony’s desk chair, and immediately doubled over.

“This is not funny!” Tony insisted.

“Yeah it is,” Rhodey said between breaths. “Brat.”

Hearing the affectionate term Rhodey had had for a runty teenage Tony in their MIT days, Tony tried to keep a straight face, but couldn’t. He was grinning broadly by the time he admitted, “Okay. I might, perhaps, see the humor in this.”

“You remember that time you snuck down to my parents’ place over break?” he asked. “And we had to lend you pajamas, but everyone else’s clothes just fell off you, so you had to borrow my kid sister’s?”

“Hey, Jeanette has impeccable taste,” Tony said, gesturing with a proportionately enormous screwdriver. “Nothing wrong with Wonder Woman jammies.” Then he looked down at the same shirt and jeans he’d been wearing day in and day out for almost a week. “Kinda having a similar problem right now, actually.”

Rhodey, clearly trying to suppress a grin, said, “You know, Jeanette’s kid has a couple of Ken dolls, you want me to raid their wardrobe for you?”

That was a horrifying prospect, not only because of the indignity and because doll clothes weren’t constructed for comfort at all, but because at this size, he’d be swimming in the clothes even more than he had been in Rhodey’s spare pajamas all those years ago. 

“Oh, fuck you,” Tony said, but he was laughing too, now.

They spent a couple minutes just bouncing the wave of laughter at the ridiculousness of the situation. Tony hadn’t realized how badly he’d needed to be able to laugh at this. It felt good to get it out. 

Once their giggles had mostly died down, Rhodey asked, “Okay, but seriously, what can I do to help?”

“Obviously I don’t want this getting out until I’ve at least got armor up and running again,” Tony said. “There’s gotta be an Iron Man in the sky. I’ve got a spare suit fitted and coded to you, would you mind if I kitted it out in the red and gold?” he asked. “Just for a couple weeks.”

“Yeah, can do,” Rhodey agreed. “I might even be able to manage leave, so I can be around next time the call comes.”

“You’re the best, you know that, right?” Tony told him.

“Okay, I feel like I’m being buttered up for whatever you plan on asking for next.”

“Hey, I already asked, I told you to bring me coffee.” Tony pouted. “What I really need is a way of making my own coffee. Begging coffee off the other Avengers is getting a little old.”

Rhodey shrugged. “Hey, best I can do at the moment is a packet of instant crystals.”

“I’ll take it.”

“Man, you’re really roughing it, huh?” Rhodey asked, eyes widening in a half-joking fashion.

“Don’t tease. You have caffeine for me, or not?”

Rhodey raised his eyebrows. “You’re telling me they set this all up for you and there’s nothing you can even use as a french press? A strainer? Nothing?”

Tony blinked, taking that in. “Wow,” he said, thinking back. “I don’t think I’ve even seen anyone use a French press since—since J prime died.”

Rhodey shook his head. “Course you’ve never had to make coffee yourself. If it wasn’t a machine, it was an actual butler.” But his voice had gone a little softer at the rare mention of Edwin Jarvis.

“But yeah,” Tony said. “Should be able to work it out with a little help from the current Jarvis. Just get me some grounds, huh? There’s some in the kitchenette.”

Bruce must have had fun designing all this titanium kitchenware. There was a decent-sized canister that would work for coffee. Rhodey even managed to fill it up without spilling much. 

It smelled like ambrosia.

Rhodey left to request that leave, and Tony and Jarvis talked over the mechanics of immersion brewing while Tony tested the railroad control systems one final time. 

“Whattya think, time for a manned test run?” Tony asked, surveying the tracks. His fatigue at the day’s work warred with his desire to get out there and start learning how to be an engineer again.

“Sir, it is three in the morning,” Jarvis objected. “I’m afraid your newfound independent access to caffeine may have gone to your head.”

Tony snorted. “All right, all right. Gonna head in for the night.”

Above him, the orange sign flicked over to “Do Not Disturb.”

* * *

When he woke up, Tony fumbled through the production of a decent cup of coffee only with Jarvis’s constant prompting at every phase, but they managed. It turned out that coffee grounds were like ground peppercorns - he could pretty much load them into the pot one by one just as easily as scooping them. This also meant he controlled the grind size very closely. Combined with Jarvis’s impeccable timing calculations, in the end, despite everything, it turned out to produce an  _ actually very good _ cup of coffee.

Tony walked out with his coffee to discover that he had a garden patio. 

The flagstones were carefully set level in a bed of fine sand, and there was a polished wooden table and chair set that looked like it had been copied out of the kind of catalogue that would use words like “rustic bistro.”

And there were plants! Some looked like tufts of giant decorative grasses set in the sand between flagstones, and others were chubby, colorful cactus-like plants set in long flower beds. There was even a tiny grove of trees with a wooden bench set in the middle. Tony prodded one suspiciously, half-expecting it to be a high end plastic aquarium decoration, but it seemed real enough. It even smelled evergreen.

“Huh,” said Tony. “Steve did this?”

“Yes, Sir,” Jarvis answered. “Although I may have advised him rather extensively.”

Tony wouldn’t have pegged himself as a person who really needed to be close to nature, but there was something about the living foliage surrounding him that made something in him uncurl and breathe a little easier.

“Tell me about the plants,” said Tony.

Jarvis gave him the stats on all of them - the ones that looked like tufts of grass were varieties of Tillandsia, and weren’t actually rooted in the sand but could be picked up and taken away to get a good soak. The ones in the flowerbeds were mostly Sempervivum of various colors with a few Haworthias thrown in, and would just need an occasional spritz of water. The grove was a group of Italian cypresses, cultivated as bonsais, their pot set into the level of the patio.

Tony sat down on the bench in the cypress grove, and enjoyed the smell of evergreens, the taste of coffee, and the view of his own private railroad stretching out across his own private realm.

“Yeah,” he said. “I could get used to this.”


	3. Economies of Scale

After the very good coffee had made its way into his brain, Tony couldn’t wait any longer to get going and actually travel around his workshop, visiting his tools and his suits and his cars, seeing what they looked like from a new vantage. 

He took the two little experiments he’d been working on building from the contents of his desk drawers and other odds and ends and he loaded them into a train car before boarding himself, and then he was off.

The first thing he did was run the trains through their paces, making sure they ran as anticipated and that he and Jarvis had a reliable system worked out for signalling where he wanted to go. It took a few minutes to just get used to the feel of them moving, a little lighter and freer to wobble on their tracks than the normal-sized version. After those factors had been adjusted to his satisfaction, he sent the trains around the workshop on their longest route, just looking at the neglected workstations, the outdated armors in their cases, the select few of his cars he’d had brought up here to fiddle with. 

In some ways, it was as familiar as the back of his hand. In other ways, it was like navigating a new city when he’d only ever seen it on a satellite feed.

The first place he actually stepped out of the train was next to the station where his newest armor stood, waiting for updates, polishing, or to be fastened onto his person for the next mission. He knew there was no way in hell he could fly it as he was, but getting inside was irresistible.

Jarvis opened one of the leg seams for him, and popped the face plate in order to send light flooding in from the top of the suit. 

It was something, as always, stepping into the armor. Somehow it felt like a safe haven, even though he knew his circumstances had compromised it just about beyond usefulness. It was also jarring, but not as much as Tony had expected. He began climbing the struts and cables of the interior structure with an ease that was only possible because of the physics of his current size. 

He poked around, and he started to plan. He didn’t have the equipment or interfaces to execute any of the plans yet, but the plans had to come first, in a lot of ways. He needed to know what tools to equip himself with first. 

Most of the actuators in the suit were directly mechanical - the only central commands the suit as a whole would take were to open, close, lock in place, or fly to his location—basic flight systems only. The suits couldn’t fight without a pilot. This was very much an intentional part of the design. There always needed to be someone with their finger on the trigger who Tony trusted, and although he trusted Jarvis, it was nearly impossible to hackproof a wireless system. 

But if the controls were locally slaved to a central hub and that central hub contained a tiny Tony—that could work.

He’d need to build an inner suit, something that would move with him to control the armor actuators. Imagining that, he was reminded of a lot of movies and TV he’d seen in his time.

He was creating a mecha. A freakin’ Jaeger. A giant robot, with him at the center.

That thought was exhilarating and totally kickass, until he was jolted with the memory of Obie’s excessive interpretation of the Mark 1.

Suddenly, he couldn’t wait to get out of the armor and into the open air. He was closer to the head than the feet, so he climbed up to the open faceplate and sat on the chin, looking out over the rest of the space. 

Thankfully, he’d brought one of the tools he’d managed to make while the team had been setting up the railroad. It was… well, functionally, it was something akin to a grappling hook gun. Technically, it was more of a bolas gun supplemented with a light adhesive.

Jarvis had given him such shit over the adhesive. And, yeah, after a few videos of insects and mice getting stuck in glue traps, Tony kinda saw his point. But it was too useful not to include. 

The cord was a sample of synthetically produced spider silk thread that R&D had sent up at some point. He hadn’t really had more than a passing interest before, but it was giving him so many ideas now that he had Jarvis send down a message to the fiber department to give him more samples, including finer thread and some of the raw fibers.

Tony fired the gun at a support strut for a nearby stretch of elevated track, and watched the sticky weights wrap themselves securely around it. Then he contemplated the length of cord in front of him.

“Sir, what are you contemplating?” Jarvis asked carefully.

“I was just gonna swing down,” Tony said. “But you know what would be more controlled yet equally awesome? Ziplines.”

There was a pause, and then Jarvis said, “That may not be a terrible idea.”

Tony laughed. “Well, that’s enough of an endorsement for me.”

* * *

After a couple of other sticky situations where Tony found himself wanting to get down from a height, he made himself a couple of rope ladders, too. And a backpack, to carry one of those and a few small tools. The lightness of the spider silk cord and the mechanics of his current size meant it was pretty easy to carry one around just about everywhere. 

He affixed one permanently to the desk, so that he could always climb back to his house if he found himself at floor level. 

The next expedition he attempted was to the kitchenette in the corner of the workshop. It was now mostly for the benefit of regular-sized visitors, as Tony had his own kitchen, so it hadn’t been honeycombed with railroad tracks, the way the rest of the workshop was. So Tony used his other new toy to navigate his way there—a tiny motorbike, powered by the battery he’d taken out of the laser pointer. 

The bike was fun—not perfectly balanced, but plenty fast to get his blood pumping. He’d missed driving. He whooped with delight as he did the tiniest wheelie and then came to a stop in front of the minifridge. Then he dug around in his backpack for a crowbar.

“Where are you going, Sir?” Jarvis asked. 

“Thought I’d restock the icebox myself today,” Tony answered. “No point bothering the team.”

The thing about Tony’s tiny kitchen was that refrigeration had been something of a head-scratcher. Refrigeration units were extremely difficult to miniaturize, and Tony had many appliances he’d had to do without in those first days and was starting to think a refrigerator was one of them until Steve had pointed out the obvious—there’d been cold food storage before the invention of refrigeration. Nothing complicated about it. Just a well-insulated box and a chunk of ice. 

Tony had wanted to use a CO2 canister to make fresh dry ice for himself, but Bruce had vetoed any use of pressurized gas that could knock Tony flat on his back or even blast him several feet away at his current scale. So regular ice had had to do.

The team had been replacing his ice cube about once a day with a new one from the common kitchen’s fridge, but now Tony was solidly back in his lab, and he wanted to do this himself.

“Sir,” said Jarvis, a note of concern coloring his voice, “I believe entering the minifridge would be a spectacularly bad idea.”

“Your concern is noted,” Tony said, and he used the crowbar to break the magnetic seal and open the door. 

“If you are not back in two minutes,” Jarvis said, “I will summon the Avengers.”

“Uh-huh,” Tony said. “You know, probably only takes one superhero to open a fridge.”

“I fervently hope that one is you, Sir,” Jarvis said. 

“Me too,” Tony said, and slipped inside.

It was cold.

Of course it was cold, but Tony felt like it was sucking all the heat out of his body at a ridiculous rate. He was going to start shivering soon, so he needed to get to work. 

He used his bolas gun to get up to the ice compartment and levered an ice cube free with his crowbar, letting it drop to the bottom of the fridge. When he got back down, he wrapped the ice cube in a piece of plastic and put it in his backpack. 

By then he could barely manage to buckle the bag shut again, which was not a great sign. 

He stumbled over to the corner of the door again and tried to get the crowbar between the fridge and the magnetic strip again, but the edge of the door curved inward to make a shelf, and it was much more awkward to get his crowbar in place from this angle. And he was shaking a lot, now. 

Hell, at the rate he was losing body heat, he might kick the bucket before his two minutes were up. 

He took a breath, reassessed, and tried a new angle for the crowbar. It failed to slip behind the magnet. 

“One more time,” he muttered to himself.

This time it slid into place, and with one good shove, the door popped open and Tony scrambled out. 

“Shit, that’s cold,” he said, rubbing his arms, and made a mental note not to do that again.

“Sir,” said Jarvis, “with respect, do not ever do that again.”

Tony glared up at his cameras, annoyed at being told what to do. “Just need to make some better clothes for it,” he said. 

“Or we could install a refrigerator with an ice dispenser,” Jarvis argued.

“Yeah,” Tony admitted. “Not the worst plan.” He still felt a little less steady than he would have liked. “How’re the vitals?”

“You have mild hypothermia,” Jarvis said. “Verging on moderate.”

“Great. How do I make it better so I can get back on my bike without shivering my way into a rollover?”

Jarvis answered by indicating the train waiting on the nearest ground-level track with a holographic pointer. “I recommend a brisk walk and a warm bath,” Jarvis said. “The motorbike can wait.”

Tony grumbled, but he started walking.

* * *

Now that Tony had a feel for his territory, he began making more specific plans about how to live in it. He’d been thinking of his desk as his home and the rest of his shop as just—well—his shop, but for the moment, it was his world, and it needed to include things like changes in scenery. 

He’d originally included the bridge that crossed over the door of the workshop because he wanted the largest loop of track to encompass the whole place, and going over the door was better than under. Otherwise someone was bound to step on the track at some point. But now that section of track was drawing his attention as a place to set up—something. An overlook point with a picnic area, maybe. He’d get another collection of bonsais, and put a little railing around the edge of their pot. 

For now, he just stood in the train and looked out at it all.

But this was a bit remote. If he was going to spend time up here, he was going to need a quick way to get back down and to one of his workstations so he could watch the Avengers’ backs when they got called out. 

That could happen at any time, really. 

Tony thought it was about time to test the zipline trolley he’d rigged up. He shot a line across to the monitor arm over the nearest workstation, and attached the near end to the track supports. Then he clambered underneath the track and swung his trolley over the line. Hanging on with both hands, he swished out across the open air. 

It was almost as good as flying the suit. 

A couple of seconds later, he stood on the work surface, exhilarated and ready for anything. 

“Yep,” he said. “That’ll work.”

* * *

The problem with the system arose later that day, when Tony was checking the carburetor of the hot rod for problems. From the inside. 

He heard Jarvis say, “Doctor Banner, please watch out for the—” followed by an ominous silence, and some disturbingly Hulk-like noises. By the time Tony emerged from the engine, Jarvis had managed to talk Bruce down and the green tinge was disappearing from his skin.

“You all right, big guy?” Tony asked, looking up at his friend who had the potential to outmass him by thousands of times, rather than the now-usual hundreds he was now.

Bruce, rubbing at a thin red line on his neck and not seeming at all inclined to answer the question, instead said, “What the hell were you doing in there, Tony? That’s so dangerous.”

“Working on my cars, it’s something I do. Seriously, are you all right? What happened?” Tony raised his eyebrows at the cameras, silently asking Jarvis, who indicated the zipline with a pointer.

_ “I’m _ fine,” Bruce said pointedly. “My cells don’t even understand the concept of permanent damage. I’m never the one in danger.” He shook his head, narrowing his eyes at Tony. “What is even in your head right now?”

“Right now?” Tony bit his lip. “Thinking I should maybe rethink the ziplines.”

“Is that what that was?” Bruce felt the mark on his neck, frowning thoughtfully. “Of course that’s what it was. You’re an adrenaline junkie.”

Tony gave Bruce a look. “You know the physics as well as I do, heights aren't as dangerous to me as they look.”

“I'm not even going into that. This is not about that. You were  _ inside the engine, _ Tony!”

“Oh, come on,” Tony said, rolling his eyes. “I was fine.”

“Do you know how many stray cats die every year in this city because they climbed inside of the hood of a car and snuggled up to the engine?” Bruce asked, gesturing wildly.

“No.” Tony paused, thinking. “That’s a thing? It doesn’t matter. I’m not a cat, Bruce. Nobody is going to start my cars with me inside. Jarvis has my back.”

“What if something happened to Jarvis?” Bruce said.

“Well then I’d be screwed six ways from Sunday whether I was in the engine or not.” Tony shrugged. “Or I’d be fine. Life’s all a roll of the dice, you should know that.”

Voice going quieter again, Bruce said, “My accident wasn’t random chance, Tony. It was my fault.”

“Agree to disagree?” Tony sighed. “I’m not saying there aren’t modifiers. There are definitely modifiers. It’s not pure chance, you’ve got all the usual factors that get tacked on when you roll a d20. Not the kind that’s in a magic 8 ball, I’m not talking vague and hand-wavy, I mean there’s some situations that we can’t control no matter what we go into it with. And maybe we’ve both demonstrated low wisdom modifiers by going after military funding without asking enough questions about how it could go wrong. But I’m not gonna stop playing.”

“Tony,” Bruce said. “Life is not a game of dungeons and dragons.” But he was suppressing a laugh.

“Sure seems like it sometimes, though, doesn’t it?” Tony said.

Bruce shook his head. “You’ve been spending too much time with gods and sorcerers.”

Tony shrugged eloquently. “Well. That just proves my point.”

* * *

Tony had some trouble deciding which projects to focus on, and in what order.

In some ways, he felt like he had when he had come back from Afghanistan - torn between trying to pick up where he left off and the new priorities he had. Obviously he had to get the armor back up and running. There were some other projects that he had been working on that he would love to get back to, but most of them were going to get put on the back burner in favor of the things it was becoming clear he could really sink his teeth into at this size: microtech. 

Material science was a whole different ballpark at this scale. There were things he’d never realized about texture and malleability, simply because he hadn’t been able to look this closely. 

Deep in some brainstorming on the concept of micro-chain mail as a component of body armor, Tony called out absently, “Hey, Loki! What—” before he remembered that the sorcerer wasn’t going to answer.

He blinked, trying to figure out what his brain was even doing there.

Why would he assume Loki was here? This project had nothing to do with magic or extraterrestrial technology. And it was only happening because Loki wasn't here. Because Loki had left and hadn't come back.

But it felt like something Loki would inspire. It felt exciting and paradigm breaking. It felt fun in a way that reminded him of that ass.

Really, in a way, Loki had inspired this project. And at this moment, he was torn between resenting Loki and thanking him.

* * *

The next few days were a weird, zigzagging path between ways in which his workshop was entirely functional and ways in which he realized he was starting from scratch. 

Anything he’d already automated was still doing its thing, so things he could control through his phone or through Jarvis were almost totally normal. But his size brought into sharp relief how many times he had to adjust something here or there manually to get a process going or troubleshoot an issue. Some of these things could be resolved by climbing up among the equipment and making the change himself, occasionally using his entire body where just a hand would have done before. Other things required help from Dum-E, or, if the bot couldn’t manage the task, Tony would resort to calling Bruce or one of the others to turn that stupid dial on the ammeter that Dum-E couldn’t quite manage and Tony couldn’t get his arms around.

But going back to his old projects wasn't the best use of his time and energy right now—he needed to either adapt his current situation to his work, or adapt his work to his current situation. Probably both.

There were a lot of ways to use the equipment he already had to help him speed up the process, but when it came down to it, Tony had to start from the bottom, with the simple tools he could get the titanium printer to produce, and work his way up to more complex technologies. At least the titanium printer meant he didn’t have to start at the very beginning, with the almost medieval forge he’d made use of in Afghanistan, when he’d found himself without some very basic tools. 

So he started the process of making tiny versions of everything from soldering irons to micrometer-tolerance molding equipment, and then he started building robots.

* * *

At one point Tony’s motorbike broke down, and he had it halfway disassembled before he realized that the tool he needed to repair it was up on his desk, and it would be a lot harder to move the heavy apparatus down to the floor where he’d made the mess than to move the bike up, even as scattered as it was.

He’d set up the bones of an elevator at the side of his desk, but it didn’t yet have a real mechanism. In fact, it was pretty much just a level platform attached to a belay/rappel setup. He loaded the pieces of his motorbike onto the platform and began hauling on the ropes.

Even considering the mechanical advantage he had at this size, he was breathing hard by the time the platform came level with his patio. 

“Well that's a workout,” he commented.

"I take it you won't be requiring any miniaturized workout equipment?" Jarvis responded.

Tony laughed. "No," he said, thinking of all the walking, climbing, hauling and various gymnastics he'd been doing to get his work done. "Pretty sure we've got that covered."

* * *

There were so many reasons to make and develop tiny robots while he could do it with his bare hands.

Besides just the fact that building robots was what he did when the world around him felt a little empty. But he didn’t let himself think about that.

He was halfway through putting together the arm of a prototype bot, which included screws that he could handle as easily as small laptop screws at his normal size, when he fully grasped that the heads of the screws were less than 200μm. If he ever got back to his normal size, this bot was going to be almost impossibly fiddly to repair and maintain. 

But if he was right, these bots were going to be worth all the trouble.

They were going to be great for getting into tight places to make repairs. Make them small enough, and they could repair cell phones without even having to pop the battery cover. 

Huh. At that scale, they could do microsurgery without any real incisions.

The problem with surgery-bots was—well. The same problems as self-driving cars, really. But people already did microsurgery with remote systems. These could work like that.

What tools would a bot like that need? Some way of attaching tissues together, like superglue, or… 

Oh. This was where some of the other applications for synthetic spider silk might come in handy.

Other people were already studying how to use the proteins of spider silk as cell scaffolds—structures that could be used as a framework for anything from healing wounds to cloning organs.

He was going to have to get Bruce in on that project. Tony had an intense interest in surgical medicine and was an expert in his own way, but Bruce was the real expert when it came to medicine, especially on the molecular level.

Tony looked at some of the studies that had come out recently, and got R&D to send him some raw silk juice to play with himself. Its ability to adhere to things even in wet environments was one of the things that made spider silk glue so interesting.

He played with this concept for a while before he had another idea.

“Hey, J, Bruce in his lab right now? Put me through, I have to tell him about this.”

“Yeah, Tony?” Bruce’s voice said through the cell phone that was propped nearby.

“Had an idea for the microplastics problem,” Tony said. “Really want your take on this. So. A spider-silk-based selective adhesive that bonds more readily with plastics than with natural marine particulates. So kind of like a filter, but kind of not, because it leaves other stuff alone and only picks up those pesky petroleum compounds.”

There was a moment of silence over the line before Bruce said, “Okay, that sounds… challenging, but if we could make it work, that would solve a lot of the problems with the existing paradigm. Do you think we could somehow make it reactive to low capacitance? Enable and disable the adhesive properties in response to stimuli? Or would it be easier to create a selection process that’s based on certain patterns of chemical bonds?”

“You tell me,” Tony responded. “I mean, I’ve got a few ideas, but I’m thinking either way this is going to require a lot of tinkering with the chemistry of this stuff. My instinct is that there are way too many formulations of plastic out there to make it dependent on bond patterns. But maybe that’s because as an engineer I know more about plastics and less about proteins. When it comes to proteins, I don’t know what’s supposedly impossible.”

“No, I think you might be right,” Bruce said over the phone. The workshop door opened and Bruce came through, cell in hand. “But we’re going to need…” Bruce stopped a couple of steps through the door, looking into the middle distance and exclaiming softly, “Oh, holy shit.”

“What?” Tony asked. “Spot a fatal flaw somewhere?”

“No, just.” Bruce stopped and took a breath. “I forgot for a second. About all this.” He waved his hand to encompass the landscape of accommodations. “Expected to walk in here and find you sitting at your desk like usual.”

Tony chuckled. “Yeah. Those were the days. But hey. I wouldn’t have had this idea without the chance to really get into the nitty gritty of these materials.”

The corner of Bruce’s mouth turned up, and he went to sit in the chair where he’d expected to see Tony. “Things are really settling into a new normal, aren't they?” he said.

“I've been told it can happen.” Tony shrugged.

“You conquered your monster, huh?” Bruce said pensively.

“Better,” Tony answered. “I made peace with it.”

“Peace.” Bruce laughed softly. “Sounds pretty okay.”

“Yeah, it is pretty okay,” Tony agreed. “Now. How are we going to get these suckers to stop sticking to everything and just stick to polymers?”

* * *

The microbots were doing well. Mostly. There were always struggles to overcome. At the moment, he was trying to figure out what the best configuration was for their i/o ports - something small enough it wouldn’t dominate their designs, but large enough he could actually plug an adaptor in there to retrieve and update data. Data was going to have to be run on a wired connection until he could figure out a way around the problem of fitting a functional wireless antenna into something less than three millimeters across. 

He was going to crack that problem eventually, though. There were so many applications just waiting for these bots. Not just medical and repair work, either. There were going to be applications for intelligence gathering, too. Tony had often wished he could be a fly on the wall for a lot of conversations going on in secret, and there were always limitations to equipment. 

He briefly entertained the idea of going on intelligence gathering missions personally, depending on his current size to be overlooked, but he shivered at the thought of being caught and potentially experimented on. He’d had enough of that for one lifetime. 

Bots would be better anyway, especially if he could get a handle on the quantum chip technology ideas he’d been brainstorming. 

And oh, it was tempting to jump ahead to things like that when he hadn’t yet worked out the details of the basic framework of his life. From microtools to clothing.

If he was going to be doing circuitry work, he was going to need to solder. And for that he’d need not just a manageable sized soldering iron, but also protective gloves and a faceplate. At this scale it was going to be more like welding than the soldering he was used to. 

Protective gloves were going to be one of the first big challenges in his microtextile work—he could no longer just use leather or rubberized fabric to encase his hands. He’d need something much thinner and much more flexible, but with equal durability.

There were a lot of other things he wanted to explore in that vein, too.

There were going to be a lot of applications for this microtextile technology if he could get it right. Medical ones, mechanical ones, and yeah, the original thought, the reason he’d already had R&D start on it, which had been soft, light body armor. But right now, Tony couldn't help focusing his attention on an application that not many people would have a use for—very tiny, very comfy clothes. 

Well, if he made a higher quality action figure of himself than what was already out there, he supposed they could wear the clothes too. And they could have removable armor! But that was an idea for later. Tony was still struggling on the clothing front, getting the machinery together that could potentially allow him to make himself items that might even feel like _ real _ clothes. 

But at least now Tony had a few other outfits courtesy of Bruce and some thin fabric he’d scrounged up from somewhere. The man knew his way around a thrift shop and had managed to get a couple of silk scarves and some tissue-weight jersey. The shirts Bruce had made out of the jersey still felt like a thick sweater, and looked baggy and slightly shapeless, but they were better than nothing by a lot. The pants? Well. They’d do for pajama pants, and thankfully Tony’s jeans were still holding up, but he missed his walk-in closet and his favorite tailor. 

He missed a lot of things. 

He shook himself, and focused back in on the loom he was still tinkering with. 

* * *

A couple of days into his new life in the workshop, he took a break from higher stakes projects to finally make a fucking washing machine.

Since his dishes were made of titanium, rather than anything even vaguely breakable, he figured he could toss them in the same machine and let them swish around and bump into each other. It was a little noisy, but it worked. 

He’d also started the framework for the living room of his workshop-based mansion, and he was really starting to feel at home in the landscape. So he’d invited the team down to see what he’d been up to, and maybe make some suggestions in the areas Tony was still struggling with.

So that was where they were when Jarvis let them know that Thor was back in the tower. Tony figured he may as well join the party.

“What’s the word?” Tony asked him immediately. 

“I am sorry I was gone for so long,” Thor said. “Loki is cloaking himself from Heimdall’s sight.”

“So you can’t tell where he is at all?” Bruce asked.

“We know he is on Earth,” Thor offered. “The cloaking is a spell that requires focus, and when he is distracted or startled, it fails momentarily. Heimdall has seen him in this city, but not in the Tower itself.”

“Did you get any clue what he’s planning?” Natasha asked.

“No,” said Thor. “Nothing.”

Steve frowned. “Should we be worried that he has another plan to conquer Earth?”

“He’s not gonna do that,” Tony said.

“Considering how things ended last time, taking Iron Man out of the skies would be a good first step, if that was his intent,” said Bruce.

Tony raised his eyebrows. “Really, Brucey?” he said. “I mean, I can’t deny green is a good look on you, but I like you angry better than jealous.”

Bruce sighed deeply.

“I would not put it past him,” Thor said heavily.

“I would!” Tony insisted. “I’ve been working with him for weeks now. Do you know what kind of power he has at his disposal? Do you know how  _ smart _ he is? If he’d wanted to take over the planet, he would have.” 

“And if he wants to now?” Natasha asked. 

“I’m saying, he doesn’t,” Tony insisted. He didn’t know exactly what had been going on in Loki’s head when he’d shrunk Tony, but it hadn’t been anything malicious. 

“Are you telling me that you think you know my brother better than I?” Thor asked.

“I mean.” Tony grimaced slightly. “There’s different ways of knowing people. You’ve admitted you can’t predict him.”

“I cannot. His actions can seem without reason or pattern.”

“See, now. A lotta people would say the same about me. But who found him after he disappeared from the helicarrier?” Tony asked, spreading his arms.

“To be fair,” Steve pointed out, “he was in your house.”

Tony scoffed. “You’d have a point if I’d just walked in and spotted him. But I went looking.”

“I hate to be the one to have to remind you about this,” Bruce said, “but you’re also the one who spent three days convinced Loki was going to come back and undo his spell, and moping when he didn’t.” 

“Ah, shit,” Tony muttered. The guy had a point.

Steve’s eyes surveyed the team. “Clint, what’s your take on this?”

“You mean do I have an insight, or do you mean is it okay with the guy he mind-controlled if we consider the possibility he might change his stripes? Because we covered that pretty thoroughly before we took the cuffs off.” When no one said anything to that, Clint shook his head ruefully. “The guy lashes out when he’s scared. Hell, I relate. Before, he was scared of the puppet master on the other side of that portal. Now? It’s hard to tell. Maybe Tony would know best, they’ve been lab buddies for a while now. Maybe none of us can really understand a guy who was born on an ice planet millions of miles away from  _ any _ of us.” He eyed Thor pointedly at that. Then he turned back to Steve. “But it doesn’t hurt to be prepared.”

“So it’s agreed,” Natasha said. “We’ll keep an eye out for any trouble with Loki’s fingerprints on it.”

“That’s probably for the best,” Bruce said. 

“Yeah,” said Tony, sighing. “Can’t hurt.”

* * *

Tony really missed flying. And yeah, ziplines weren’t turning out to be an ideal substitute.

He considered just buying a consumer drone, but even the smallest were way bigger than he needed, and would feel more like flying in a helicopter than properly flying.

Speaking of helicopters, there were some pretty minimal RC helicopters at about the right scale, but the precision of their controls left a lot to be desired. 

He could use one for parts, though. Make something else out of it. And he had a lot of ideas.

He and Rhodey had been involved in the development of the EXO-7 unit, back when military contracts had been Stark Industries’ bread and butter, and a lot of the ideas from that project had gone into the suits. But they were a great model for a relatively simple personal flight system.

And at Tony’s current size, he could actually use the wings for a lot more of the thrust and direction adjustments, and the core engine unit would only need to keep him aloft. Much more like being an actual bird.

It was an intriguing idea, and one that he could actually tinker with while he was still working on designing something that could take him up to the level of Avenger again.

He didn’t need armor to fly around the lab.

He had to tumble a few times before he admitted to himself that he was really going to need to make himself some knee pads, at least.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> When I split this chapter, this first half was the one where all the gaps were, and the second half was almost done, so it should be out really soon! -q


	4. The Finer Things

The next time the Avengers were called to assemble again, Rhodey had been ensconced in the tower and eating meals in the team common room with the rest. He worked smoothly with the team, flying the red and gold armor like a pro. 

Tony was on comms, of course, getting all the info he could via the suit feeds and any other footage he could get his hands on. He pointed Rhodey towards places in the fight where he might be needed, maneuvers he could do. 

“Hey, I could do without quite this much backseat driving,” Rhodey complained.

“Sure, mister ‘don’t be a lone gunslinger’. Shut up and let me watch your six. Speaking of which!”

Rhodey turned just in time to repulsor the alien goo thing that had been trying to sneak up on him right in the face.

“Yeah, all right,” he said, wiping his faceplate clear. “Do what you gotta do.”

* * *

By the time the Avengers were all back at the tower (mission accomplished, a few bumps and bruises) the news feeds had started to run towards commentary. They’d noticed Iron Man wasn’t flying quite like Iron Man. 

Which was probably inevitable, but at least all they had were guesses, and nothing concrete.

Rhodey was the only one of the team who didn’t feel the urgent need to shower, thanks to the armor, so while everyone else was washing up, Rhodey came down to the workshop to pick up Tony and bring him up to the common room for the traditional post-battle feast. 

Tony could count on his fingers the number of humans he trusted enough to let them touch him casually. The team, Pepper, and Rhodey. That didn't mean he had to like it. But one of the main things that made being carried by Steve especially unpleasant was that Steve carried him like a kid who had recently had a growth spurt and was still incredibly aware that he didn't always know his own strength. After that, Clint had started the tradition of carrying him around in a styrofoam cup, which, while still undignified, didn't have the same kind of awkwardness to it. 

Rhodey carried him with the casual confidence of an older brother, the way he had slung Jeanette and occasionally Tony around when it was past their bedtime. Not that he wasn't being careful, but it was the difference between someone carrying a raw egg carefully because their home ec grade depended on the egg staying intact, and someone carrying a raw egg without too much thought because it was their usual job to make the rounds of the chicken coop. 

It didn't even occur to Tony to suggest that Rhodey use the cup. And it might have still felt slightly embarrassing, but Tony didn't feel like complaining. Someone touching him like it was normal was totally worth that price.

As Rhodey let him down onto the dining table, Tony gave his thumb a little slap, like the ones they dropped on each other's shoulders in encouragement or solidarity. Or in this case, thanks.

Once they settled in with their mountains of takeout, they began dissecting the fight, how they’d performed and how well Rhodey was settling in. 

Then Natasha asked, “So do we think that had anything to do with Loki?”

“I don’t see why it would,” Steve said. “There’s a huge universe out there and these aliens didn’t seem to want to talk to anyone shaped like us. Seemed like they were just hungry.”

Which would have been fine, except they were hungry for bitumen, apparently, so they’d started eating into the asphalt of the city streets and peeling the roofing materials off buildings. The Avengers had tried to herd them away from the city infrastructure, but interfering in their dinnertime seemed to be the only thing that could provoke anything like a violent reaction. Steve had nearly been suffocated by one of them before the others had managed to kill it. 

“Listen, you know why I think it could have been Loki?” Tony said. “We won. Nobody got hurt. You know he set us up to win last time, right?”

Thor shook his head solemnly. “I might have said the same thing myself, once. But the Battle of New York was more than a bit of mischief.”

“That’s my point,” Tony said, to widespread confusion. “No, really, think about it. If what your brother usually does is mischief, but there are a couple of exceptions, you wanna look at those exceptions really hard to see what was going on there that was different. Don’t listen to what comes out of his mouth. That’s where the bedazzlement happens. The flash and distraction.”

He was settling into a good long rant when Jarvis interrupted. “Excuse me, Sir,” he said. “Miss Potts is calling.”

“Shit, did we have a thing? I thought I told you to cancel all my things. If anything good came out of all this, it’s that I have a good excuse not to go to board meetings.”

“That may be part of the problem,” Jarvis pointed out. “But in a more immediate sense, I believe this is about Iron Man’s flight style in the recent battle.”

“She noticed it was me flying?” Rhodey asked, raising his eyebrows.

“Someone did,” Jarvis answered, turning on the news, which showed a less unflappable than usual Pepper with a microphone directed at her face. The text at the bottom of the screen included the question, ‘Has Iron Man been replaced?’

Tony whistled. “Yep. That’d do it.”

“You want backup for this conversation?” Rhodey asked. 

“Nah. Go,” he told the team. “Save yourselves. This could get messy.”

“Had enough mess for one day,” Clint agreed, and stood up to leave, picking up a few takeout containers to throw away as he went. The others trailed out as well.

“You let Pep know I’m okay, right?” Tony asked Jarvis.

“I did indeed. Following your example with Colonel Rhodes, I declined to give information over the phone. She is on her way and I will fill her in on the situation in the elevator.”

“Thanks, J.” Tony took a deep, settling breath. He went to wash up in his enormous tiny bathroom, and then unashamedly paced the Lego-framed front terrace for a while.

He wasn’t sure how he felt about Pepper seeing him like this. Which was weird, because Pepper had seen him at his worst, and he could remember a time when she was the only one he wanted to see everything about his life. But things had gotten complicated. She’d gotten skittish about Iron Man.

When Pepper came in, she rushed over to him, looking down at him with enormous, wide eyes. “Oh my God, Tony. Are you okay? Are you safe? Do you need anything.”

“Pep! I’m fine. I’m fine! J told you I’m fine, right?”

She took a breath, and sat down at the table, in the spot Bruce had been occupying lately. “I’ve heard a lot of things about you over the last few hours from a lot of people,” she told him, clearly holding herself together only by sheer force of will. “I wasn’t sure who to believe.”

“I’m safe, I’m dealing with this. The team’s been helping me.”

Her eyes roved over the tiny cabin on the dining table and the ‘outdoor’ living space in front of it. “I can see that,” she said. “So how did this happen, exactly? Jarvis said you couldn’t reverse it, so I assume it’s not some of your tech gone wrong.”

“No,” Tony said. “This was all Loki. ‘Magic,’ whatever that means.”

“I can’t say I’m shocked.” She pressed her lips together. “You just had to work with him, didn’t you?”

“Well, yeah. We have to know what’s out there, and we have to have the best tools we can to deal with whatever it is.”

Pepper just sighed, glaring down at him. 

“Why are you mad at me, exactly?” Tony asked. 

“You’ve clearly been dealing with this for a while,” she said, waving her hands at the house. “And meanwhile I’m off running your company, with no idea what’s going on with you and why you’ve canceled all your appointments and stopped flying around in high-tech armor.”

“I’m not really spreading it around. No one knows except the people who literally live in my house. And Rhodey.” Tony winced.

“That’s not the point!” Pepper exclaimed. “Tony. I don’t want to hear from a reporter, or a SHIELD agent, or anyone I barely know that you’re hurt or dying or missing. Not ever again. Okay? That wasn’t the deal. The deal was that you tell me things like this.”

“Listen, do you want me to attempt another omelet? Because all I’ve got is this fifteen millimeter diameter titanium frying pan and my equally minuscule cooking skill, but I’m willing to give it a shot.”

"No, Tony, I do not want a tiny omelet. I want you to take responsibility for your situation!"

“I’m trying!” he snapped. “It’s a mess, I get that it’s a mess. You want to walk in my shoes for a minute? Because it’s been a real pain, okay?”

“You really want to go there, buster?” Pepper took off one of her heels and waved it emphatically at him.

Tony blinked up at it. For a moment, all he could think about was Loki’s speech, upon arriving on Earth, about the ant and the boot. “Watch it with that thing!” he hollered up at her.

She widened her eyes, and then laughed, and it sounded slightly brittle. "I think you’re due a scare after what you put me through.” She put her shoe down, and pinched the bridge of her nose. “So what do you need? Is there a plan to... to put you back the way you were?”

“Not exactly,” he hedged. “But I’ve got things covered. The workshop is shaping up, I’m learning to deal—”

“You’re working down there?!” Pepper yelped. “Like this?”

“Yeah?” Tony said. “I’ve got to get back to work, I need armor…”

At that word, her back straightened immediately and she gave him a poisonous glare. “You’re crazy,” she told him. “So damn determined to be independent.”

“I've had to be!” he snapped back.

She shook her head. “This is why we broke up. You can't just... accept that someone is trying to help you. Maybe keep you a little safer.”

“No, that's fine!” he protested. “I appreciate it. Always have. But I'm not going to change what I do because of it. How I work.”

“I know, Tony,” she said, so sadly, and started to stand. “Only your enemies can do that.”

Fuck. Was that true?

He wanted to protest, but he wasn’t sure he could, and Pepper was already walking out, and…

Was that Loki?

Tony’s head snapped around to the far corner, but when he finally managed to focus in on the spot, no one was there. 

_ I’m going bonkers. Looking too hard for someone who’s just left me here, thinking I’d perish. Seeing things that aren’t there. _

But the Loki in his mind’s eye had an expression on his face that Tony had never seen or imagined. Something… wistful.

Would his brain really have produced that on its own?

“Uh. J? Did you… did you catch that, buddy?”

“Loki. The anomaly was present in only a few frames of the feed, but yes. I did. Shall we assume that this is also not a glitch we are both experiencing?”

“Let’s assume that,” Tony agreed. “Loki? Hey, Loki? You can come out, you know. We’ve been looking for you. Not to cuff you again. I just want to talk to you, and lemme tell you, it’d be a lot less unsettling if I could see your face.”

But the room was silent. 

“Anything, J?” Tony asked.

“No, Sir. No further anomalies.”

Tony heaved a huge sigh. “Well,” he said, “at least I know I’m right about  _ one _ thing.”

* * *

In between all his other new projects, Tony took everything he knew about Loki’s magic and tried to figure out how Loki’s cloaking spell might work. He knew he didn’t yet have the expertise to make something physically invisible using ‘magic,’ but he could use retroreflective panels or something for that part. The part he was interested in was making something or someone undetectable to magic users via magical means of detection. 

Tony and Jarvis tossed around a few ideas, and they even consulted with Thor to find out what he knew about it.

“So I’ve been wondering,” Tony asked him, “does Heimdall’s magic vision work the same way as other means of magical detection you know about? Can Loki’s cloaking block them all?”

“I am not a spellcaster,” Thor told them, “but I know this: neither Heimdall the all-seeing, nor my mother with the gift of prophecy, nor my father who sits upon the throne of vision, can see my brother when he does not wish to be seen. I know of no magic on any realm that can find him, or I would have gone there and asked the seers of him for you.”

“Thanks, buddy,” said Tony. “That’s really good to know.”

“I am sorry I could not be of more help,” Thor said.

“No, that’s actually really good,” Tony told him. “I’m trying to recreate the cloak, maybe I can figure out some way to be undetectable to magic users myself.”

* * *

Meanwhile, things were shaping up on the clothing front. Tony had a functional microscale loom, and he was testing out various fibers on it. He knew some things that were going to work just fine at his scale, adjusting for the changed coarseness and flexibility of the materials. Suits were supposed to be somewhat coarse and rigid, so he originally thought he might even be able to use the kind of standard cotton twill that would normally be used for a dark-colored chino. But through experimentation, he discovered it wouldn’t look entirely right unless he used slightly finer threads than the norm. And it still had a distinctive cottony quality to it. He made a note to try adding in some rabbit angora to the blend.

A tightly woven silk in the fine thread usually used for silk scarves proved to be just fine for making denim that looked the right scale on him and was actually incredibly comfy. He wondered idly if anyone made silk denim for regular scale people. 

It was the shirts and underwear that were proving the most problematic. 

Plastic microfibers could either be soft or they could be absorbent, not both. Silkworm silk was a decent compromise between the two, but perfect at neither. He’d asked R&D to send him up some raw synthesized spider silk fibers, so he could experiment with different applications for them. And they did seem to be the best bet. But Gary, his tiny robotic tailor, was having a little bit of a temper tantrum about how difficult it was to work with.

A robot who was going to be interacting so closely with Tony’s body and doing a task as subtle as high-end tailoring needed to be smart. Tony had based his core programming off of Jarvis, but focused on what a tailor would need to be able to know, like human motion and ideas of fashion, and what algorithms he could fit on Gary’s tiny quantum chips. The result was that Gary had a disconcertingly human personality for a bot who could be mistaken for a largish spider. 

Whenever Tony complained that the fit wasn’t quite right, or the seams on his cuffs looked off, Gary would complain right back.

“You need to get into the clothes!” he told Tony. “Do more fittings!”

Tony sighed. He had so much to get done, now that he was finally starting to be able to build things again. “Come on, Gary. I’m still me, I’m just scaled down. You can extrapolate from my fitting data down in the uniform fabrication shop.”

“You may be scaled down,” Gary objected, “but the fibers aren’t! I need to see how they look on you, how your movements affect the elasticity of the fibers. The fabrics react so differently at this scale. And not all of these are traditional materials in the first place! The synthetic spider silk is a good analogue in some ways, but its elasticity throws off all my measurements when I least expect it!”

“All right, all right,” said Tony, and followed the bot into his dressing room to let the spidery metallic arms poke and prod at the fit of his latest suit. 

“I don’t have to work miracles to make you look good,” Gary continued as Tony turned around for him, “but it’s going to take something close to a miracle to make you look like you’re wearing the same basic materials everyone else is wearing.”

Well, Tony was asking a lot of Gary, who was a days-old bot. But he’d always been particular about his clothes, and he didn’t intend to stop now, despite the challenges. Being this small required much more precise tolerances for functionality and comfort.

They’d get it ironed out eventually.

“You’re really going all in on getting the look down, huh?” Steve commented when Tony invited him down to order some furniture for the new house that was shaping up on his desk. 

“Well, I have a plan,” Tony answered. “I want to make some videos. Keep the company and the public in the loop, without giving the game away. You think you could make me a desk that’ll stand up to scrutiny?”

“You’ll probably have to help with the sanding on the detail work,” Steve said, “but otherwise I don’t see why not. I’ve got a lot of birch left over from your garden table.” 

They discussed design for a while, and Steve made some sketches for various pieces. Once they’d got the designs to a place where Tony approved and Steve thought he could pull them off, Steve left, whistling to himself. 

There was still almost an hour before Tony had another meeting with Pepper scheduled, and he didn’t want to get too caught up in his work and forget she was coming over. Distraction wasn’t going to be a good look after the way they’d argued the last time. 

So he settled in with another episode of The Next Generation, which he’d been continuing to marathon in the background when he was doing simpler tasks because, well, it was good, but not too complex to follow while multitasking. And he’d been having to do more of the simpler tasks in his life himself than usual, recently. As he watched, he went over his rough plans for the weeks ahead. 

He was into season 6 now, and a small group of the crew had just gotten munchkinized. Not like Tony, but they were little kid shaped, and it was all kinds of inconvenient, but in other ways it was freeing. 

Tony was having a hard time looking away from the screen again as Troi talked to Picard about his options for adjusting his life to his current size. At first Picard rankled under the implication that he would need to live differently, but then Troi led him to look at it another way. A chance for a break, a chance to take another path for a little while. Explore different things.

Which was a good way of looking at his situation. But then there was Keiko’s story. The problem of relationships across a gap that seemed unbridgeable. That wasn’t an immediate concern for Tony, as he wasn’t involved in a relationship at the moment. But he would like to be. At some point in _ the rest of his life. _

The characters on Star Trek also had it a little easier than him, because if the deus ex machina didn’t show up to turn them back, they’d still grow up again. That wasn’t happening for Tony. He was a four inch tall adult. And as such, there were things he’d never again get to do. 

As the credits rolled, Jarvis reminded Tony that Pepper was on her way up. Which was rotten timing. He didn’t want to be thinking about this now. 

But it was what it was. He had to get on with his life. He took a breath, and faced the monstrous specter of his ex coming through the door. 

“I’m sorry about last time,” was the first thing she said. “You really scared me, you know?”

“I know.” He grimaced. 

She looked him over, the clothes he’d almost gotten to the point of looking normal, the house which was shaping up, the terrace where he sat at his tiny bistro table, and the train. “You look like you’re handling this well,” she said.

“I’d like to think so.” He shrugged. “Sometimes I am and then along comes something that just knocks me right out.” Shit. He hadn’t meant to admit that.

“Like what?” she asked.

“Listen,” he told her. “This is not your job. You don’t want me to whine to you about this stuff.”

“Tony. I’m not just running your company. I’m your friend.” She looked slightly hurt again which was the last thing he wanted.

“Exactly. We’re friends. Okay, you’re my ex, you’re the last person who wants to hear about how I realized today I might never get to just. Kiss anyone. Ever again.”

Her face fell. “Oh, Tony.”

“I’m not wrong, am I? You’re not here for this.”

She winced. “I mean. Have you thought about counseling?”

Tony shook his head. “I don’t want to tell a psychologist about this. I don’t want anyone to know about this who doesn’t absolutely have to know. Do you understand how vulnerable this makes me? I’d have to get counseling to get to a place where I’d be ready to get counseling.”

“You can’t hide away for the rest of your life.”

Tony wrinkled his nose. “I mean. Pretty sure I could.”

“Hmm.”

Tony sighed, putting his hands in his pockets. “But you’re right. I’m gonna have to tell the company something. And the public.”

She narrowed her eyes at him in that faux-disapproving way she had. “Why do I feel like you have a plan?”

“Not only do I have a plan, but I’m almost ready to unveil it. I just need a little bit of help. That’s why I called you.”

“You’re asking for my help?” she asked, raising her eyebrows.

“Well. You know. Only if you’re not too busy being brilliant at running my company.”

She folded her hands in her lap and looked down at him. “Tony. I would be thrilled to help you. Probably. What do you need?”

“I want to shoot some videos about the new division I’ve been focusing on, the microtech stuff, but without giving away why I’m working on it. I could use a hand with those scripts.”

“I can do that,” she said, smiling. 

They ended up talking for a couple of hours about the best way to sell the MicRobotics concept to the board and the public without any in-person meetings, and it was good. Being friends with Pepper was good. 

* * *

The scripts got done, and the desk got done, and Tony’s wardrobe went through a few final tweaks. He got a camera set up to shoot from inside his tiny living room, where his little desk lived, out the window and over the edge of his big desk to show the city skyline in the background. At that kind of distance, scale hardly mattered. 

Bruce came down at one point to help with something or other, and in the middle of a task he stopped dead, staring at the tiny movie set. 

“What?” Tony asked. “We miss something obvious? Something where everyone’s gonna notice it’s off?”

“I don’t think there’s a problem,” Bruce said, “but it just occurred to me that there might have been an easier way to do a lot of this.”

“Huh,” said Tony. “I’m all ears.”

“Well, I know we ruled out Pym particles as either the cause of or the solution to your little problem,” said Bruce thoughtfully, “but it hadn’t occurred to me that we might be able to use them to shrink things down for you. Like clothing, or furniture.”

Tony frowned, giving that some serious thought.

“Nah,” he said at last, shaking his head. “Wouldn’t be practical.”

“One of us probably has the contacts to get them,” Bruce argued. “I know they’re rare and Hank Pym guards his secrets pretty closely. But we’re Avengers, and we’ve got how many doctorates between us?”

“It’s not that,” Tony said. “Think about this, Brucie. You shrink down a pair of jeans with Pym particles, it’s still got all its mass, right? I’m, what, half an ounce right now? And I don’t need to be dragging a pound and a half of denim around with me everywhere. The minute I moved wrong, they’d fall right off.”

“...Huh,” said Bruce, looking into the middle distance. “Fair. But what about furniture?”

“Yeah, I don’t wanna stub my toe on a desk that’s got more density than concrete,” Tony said. “Besides, I like the one I’ve got.”

Bruce pressed his lips together. “You’re right,” he said. “It’s not worth the trouble. But if you think of anything that might be, I can look into getting the particles.”

“Thanks, big guy,” Tony said. “You’re the best.”

He recorded the videos against the backdrop they’d created, and left the camera in place so he could do live video conferences with the same perspective. He didn’t think he was going to miss live appearances much.

And his armor pod was up and running.

The finished pod was a little larger than a grapefruit, spherical and covered in a shifting array of miniaturized repulsors and fine-grained retroreflective panels. Inside a layer of vibranium plated armor panels was Tony’s control suite, all the comforts of the interior of the iron man armor but significantly more roomy. Motion sensors encased his limbs and torso and cradled the back of his head, screens and speakers surrounded him. 

The retroreflective software could feed information to the panels to make the pod effectively invisible, but they could also project whatever image Tony desired. And most of the time, Tony desired them to project a real-time image of his facial expressions. 

“You like it?” Tony asked Bruce, grinning.

“It’s  _ weird,” _ Bruce said. “I feel like I’m talking to a tiny floating disembodied head.”

“Weirder than talking to a four inch tall adult human?”

“...Actually, no,” Bruce admitted. “I’ll get used to it.”

They all got used to it eventually, Tony’s pod-head nyooming in and out of the elevators, coming up to the common room and zipping around their ears. Clint had taken to trying to swat it like a bug. The pod was well-armored, of course, but Tony still learned pretty quickly how to dodge. 

It was actually a good thing to train for, when Tony thought about it. 

He was still tweaking the suit control systems and their connection to the pod, of course, but it would be ready to go for the next mission, whenever that was. None of the suits were ever really completely done. 

He was happy. Mostly. 

The next time he came up to the common room for dinner, stepping out of the pod and into the courtyard to sit at his table, things had settled into a new normal that was comfortable. The team wasn’t staring at him anymore. They were treating him like Iron Man again. This was Rhodey’s last night here before he went back on base, and Tony was ready for that to happen. 

"So I'm gonna guess you're not still hoping for Loki to show up any minute now and undo this?" Clint asked him. 

Tony's brain yelled "No!" but simultaneously, it also yelled "Yes!" 

He wasn't sure what his face was doing, but whatever it was, Clint gave him a bemused look and said, "What the fuck was that, dude?"

Tony didn't the fuck know. 

"He  _ really _ wants to see Loki," Natasha teased. "Just not to put his life back the way it was."

"Huh," said Clint, raising his eyebrows. "...Huh."

"What are you talking about?" Tony asked in the most exasperated, skeptical tone he could manage.

“Wait, you mean… he wants to  _ see _ Loki?” Steve asked. “As in romantically?”

Tony made a strangled noise. That was! That was. A thought.

“I could see it,” Bruce mused. 

“Well, if he doesn’t show up,” Tony said after a moment’s contemplation, “it’s a moot point.”

“And you no longer expect him to return?” Thor asked.

“Nah,” Tony said. “Not after all this time. But hey, it’s not the end of the world. I’ve got everything I need.”

“You sure?” Rhodey asked.

“Yeah, ‘course I’m sure. All right, I gotta head back to the lab. Work to do.”

He had everything he needed, a home and a workshop and armors that he could fly. 

And he still couldn’t fucking get Loki out of his head. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As a bonus Star Trek reference, yes, Gary should be voiced by Andrew J. Robinson.


	5. Broken Eggs in Lilliput

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> AKA: How to make a tiny omelet and explain the whole “death” thing

“Good to have you back, Iron Man,” Cap said as Tony took the field with the others.

“Good to be back,” Tony replied. Then a Doombot winged him with an energy beam, throwing the armor off course. “I think.”

The team had fought Doctor Doom once before, in an encounter that had involved Reed Richards and his family, who were currently involved in research aboard the ISS. Ever since then, Tony had been consumed with curiosity about how the guy managed to combine magic and technology in these damn bots of his. 

Tony was definitely ahead on the tech front, but yeah, he was a little behind on the magic stuff. He liked to think he had been making progress, slowly but surely, with Loki’s help.

Between smashing all the Doombots, Hulk was sniffing around, trying to find out which one of the identical figures was Doctor Doom himself and not one of his bot facsimiles. They’d found in the last fight that he was the one of the Avengers most capable of telling the difference. Tony was fascinated by the question of whether this was down to Hulk’s prodigious sense of smell, or whether it involved Bruce’s prodigious brain too. Potentially whatever semi-magical component the Super Soldier Serum involved could be at work there as well. 

Hulk’s head came up suddenly as he seemed to smell something new. He smashed the nearest bot, who was in his way, but also yelled, “Shellhead! There!” and pointed at another green robed figure, who promptly vanished. 

Apparently “Shellhead” was his new nickname for Iron Man. Made sense, Tony supposed, what with his recent habit of zooming around in a little shell with his face projected onto the surface. 

After that, Tony was on the lookout for flickers of green cloak appearing out of nowhere, because if Doom could do that vanishing trick, he could ambush any of the team. The problem was that he caught some glances of green-cloaked villain, but they didn’t look like Doom, and they vanished as soon as they’d appeared. 

It was probably a product of his brain expecting Loki around every corner for weeks now. 

He needed to pay attention to what was actually going on in the battle. Doom was thrashing them. One of the bots had thrown Steve into a building, and from the way he’d been moving since, he almost certainly had broken ribs. 

It was harder to tell the extent of Natasha’s injuries unless she was bleeding, and even then—but she was slowed down a little, which couldn’t mean anything good. 

Hulk and Thor were still going strong, at least, but they were being kept busy containing the bots from rampaging around the rest of Manhattan.

Tony needed to distract Doom from Steve and Natasha, and keep him from targeting the hawk up on his ledge.

Stupidly, Steve had gotten up one more time, and was now trying to reason with one of the Doombots. Or possibly it was actually Doom, but Hulk’s attention was elsewhere, so there was no way to be sure. 

Steve had at least succeeded in that Doom had given up on attacking him for a moment to preach about the purpose behind his attack. 

The speech was arch and terrible. Tony would almost have rather been in a board meeting. 

“Really? That’s the best villain monologue you can come up with?” Tony snarked. “Believe me, I’ve heard better.”

All the bots were now looking at Iron Man. 

“Well! Now that I have your attention!” Tony said, extending his arms.

And he fired a round with the cutting laser, angling diagonally to get the optimal number of Doombots without hitting any of the team. Yeah, he cut into the road a little bit too, but it was already going to need repaving. Again. 

Six bots down. Three still focused on Tony. And one had a weapon that glowed an ominous red. Tony launched into the air, but just too late to escape the blow of the energy beam. It hit Iron Man’s shoulder and—

A red and gold arm tumbled to the pavement.

Tony let out a shocked breath. It was a moment before he remembered that limbs falling off the suit didn’t translate to Tony himself anymore, and he could just breathe and keep flying. 

“Shit,” Clint said. “Had me for a minute there.”

“You don’t have to tell me, I’m in the armor! Not a picnic.” Tony whipped around to face the same doombot with the glowing weapon. “Feel like I’m gonna lose more limbs before this is over.”

“Oof,” Clint said. “Remind me not to insult Doom’s speeches to his face.” He shot the bot in question with a sonic arrow, but it only managed to delay the thing for a minute.

Steve threw his shield to knock the weapon out of the Doombot’s hands. “We need to find a way to shut that thing down. Any ideas?”

“I’m a little busy!” Tony said, just as another bot picked up the weapon and blasted Iron Man right in the chest.

The armor shattered.

“Full stealth mode,” Tony snapped, “launch escape pod.”

There was one final jolt as the last of the suit fell away, the pod launching half a second before a burning blast tore the armor to shreds. 

“Stealth working okay?” Tony asked Jarvis.

“Retroreflection is fully operational,” Jarvis said. “Antimagic measures are up and running, and all known relevant frequencies are masked.”

“You all right in there, Stark?” Clint asked from his perch.

“All good. That was my only pod-modded armor, though, so no more Iron Man in this fight.”

“Well,” Natasha said as she ducked into an alley to change magazines, “losing Iron Man is one thing, losing you is another. And I changed my mind a long time ago about which one I’d rather have in my corner.”

“That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me,” Tony quipped, and then refocused on strategy and observation, watching the team’s backs where he could. 

Another flash of a green cloak caught his eye, and this time it didn’t vanish or resolve into another fucking Doombot. Loki materialized on the field, spear in hand, walking towards one of the bots with murder in his eyes. The one with the energy weapon.

Thor gaped, stopping in the middle of the fight to call his brother’s name. He almost got clocked by a bot while he was distracted, but Hulk smashed it away just in time. 

“Huh,” said Natasha, not taking her eyes off the bot she was gunning for but still seeming to see everything. “I would not have expected to see him here.”

“We could use the help,” Steve admitted, panting and watching as Loki eviscerated the bot and moved onto the next with brutal efficiency.

“I’m not sure if help is what Loki has in mind,” Clint said, “but at least we know where he is now." 

Thor and Hulk were still at work on the perimeter, but Steve and Natasha were standing back, apparently having decided that giving Loki a wide berth was the best course of action for the moment. After a few minutes, Steve said, “Hawkeye, Thor, Hulk, you stay and monitor the situation. The rest of us should get back to the tower to get checked out.”

Tony kind of wanted to argue, but what was he gonna do? Go stop Loki from doing their work for them? In his floating shell of an escape pod, not even a suit?

Weirdly, the thought of going out there and making himself known in the pod was scarier because it meant showing the public what had happened, and not because it meant facing Loki, who had done this.

He really considered it, though. Which was a head trip. It never seemed worth contemplating for any other reason, but now for Loki?

Loki, who did this to him?

Loki, who seemed to be in pain and attempting to take it out on a legion of Doombots?

No. Whatever was going on with Loki, he could suffer through it alone. The hovering invisibly while your lab buddy suffers thing was not quite Tony’s style. Even when it might count as turnabout.

But then the last bot was taken down, and Loki sat panting in the wreckage for a moment before vanishing.

What  _ was _ that?

It could have been personal beef between Loki and Doctor Doom. They had no idea what Loki had been up to for the last while. Tony didn’t think so, but then he didn’t know what to think. 

He’d thought he and Loki had a good thing going in the workshop. He’d thought they were friends, or something, but then Loki had abandoned him. And now it looked like he might have gone nuts again. 

There were a lot of reasons to believe that Loki hadn’t been himself during the invasion, but the thing was, who was Loki? And how could they ever predict what was going to take him out of himself and make him into some crazed violent animal?

This wasn’t like the invasion. Was that a good thing, or a bad thing? Tony could read a lot of what had been driving him during the invasion. The same sort of hurt and hopeless nihilistic impulses that had driven Tony to bring crowds together, impress them, break windows during that one wild birthday party that he’d spent marinating in palladium and the certainty that he was going to die. The same sort of desperate eleventh-hour plotting that had made him think fighting Rhodey was a good way to make sure that there would still be someone left to save the day after Tony fell. 

That was the reflection of himself that Tony had seen in Loki’s eyes when they’d faced off in the tower as the invasion began. 

This was something else. And Tony didn’t know exactly what it was, but he knew enough about Loki to know by now that it was something big. Something terrible. And Tony probably ought to find out what it was, in case it threatened the world the way Loki’s puppet master had during the invasion.

“Sir,” Jarvis interrupted his thoughts. “Loki is in the tower.”

“Huh,” Tony said. “Did you figure out how to bypass the cloak?”

“He’s not cloaking, Sir.”

Another new thing. Loki, in the tower, not hiding. Looking for something?

“Well, shit. Guess I’d better go see what he wants.” He steered his pod back inside the tower. “Where’s our rogue trickster god, what’s he up to?” 

“Outside the workshop,” Jarvis directed. “And he seems to be in some distress.”

“Injured?”

“Not that I can detect.”

Tony found him on the floor outside the workshop, curled up, sobbing. Never thought he’d see Loki any way but standing straight and regal. The guy had so much investment in his pride. But Tony had faked that often enough to know that things were rarely as simple as that projected image. 

He’d just never expected to get more than a fleeting glimpse behind it.

Tony flicked the switch that turned the retroreflective panels into his usual socially projected image—speaking of those—and went to hover in front of Loki.

“Hey, tall, dark and angsty. What’s this about?”

Loki wiped his eyes with the heel of one hand, expression going blank. Or bleak. It was hard to tell.

“Are you a simulacrum?” Loki asked, glancing in the direction of the floating pod. “Did Stark create you before I—”

Loki’s voice broke there, his expression crushing in on itself again.

“Nah, I’m the real deal,” Tony said. “Not that easy to kill.”

“He was mortal,” Loki said, shaking his head. “Incredibly easy to kill. I should never have—” He flinched. When he continued, his voice was almost too quiet to hear. “Never have done anything to make it even easier. I am poison to everyone I touch.”

Well, shit.

A little Jarvis-esque voice in his head warned Tony that it was probably not smart to get out of his armored pod in the presence of an unstable godlike alien. He ignored it. The pod touched down on the floor a few feet away from Loki, and Tony stepped out, spreading his arms in a ‘here I am’ gesture. “Yeah. Still not that easy to kill.”

Loki’s eyes followed the motion seemingly automatically, but as the knowledge of what he was seeing seemed to gain traction in his mind, Loki’s face seemed to gain life again, and his eyes widened in wonder. 

“Tony!” he breathed. “You’re alive!” He reached out towards Tony, who took an involuntary step back. Loki flinched and drew his arms back in close to himself, his expression shuttering. 

“Not a scratch,” Tony reassured. “I’m guessing you saw the armor blow?”

“I thought the worst. The thread of my tracking spell snapped.” Loki looked pale as he spoke of it.

“Yeah,” Tony said conversationally, walking a few steps closer to Loki again. “Been studying up on that thing you do where you hide yourself from other magic users, and I must’ve got somewhere with it, which, good thing or Doom would’ve kept going after me.”

Loki took a breath, set his jaw deliberately, and said, “Then I am glad for it.” He didn’t look happy, but he at least looked like he was putting himself back together.

Tony made a moue. “Have to be honest with you here, after how we left things I didn’t expect to see you again. I mean, as enemies, maybe. Not like, uh, this. Not after what you did.” Tony gestured to himself. 

“It was not done out of ill will.” Loki was deliberately not looking at Tony as he said it.

Tony clicked his tongue. “Yeah. You know that doesn’t make a lot of sense, right?”

Loki looked at Tony out of the corner of his eye, then away, then back again, as if he wanted to reassure himself that Tony still existed. 

“I wanted to cause a problem that would not harm you but that you couldn’t build your way out of. Something that would stop you from flying into danger quite so often. I was frustrated with your confidence in your abilities.”

“Well, you definitely put up some hurdles around here,” Tony admitted. 

“I did.” Loki eyed Tony carefully. “I assume you’d like me to restore you to your former size?”

Tony hesitated. He looked through the door to the workshop, at the trains and new bots, the house and gardens, all the fiddly little projects he’d been making so much progress with. Then he looked the other way, at the elevator. At the path to the outside world.

“Well?” Loki asked.

He had a life here. And yeah, it wasn’t perfect, but he’d built it. His friends had helped. 

Did he want to go back? To board meetings and adoring crowds and mostly empty flirtations with fans?

Tony found himself, suddenly, thinking about what Pepper had said when she’d found out about all this. That only an enemy could change the way he lived his life. 

But then, Loki wasn’t quite an enemy. Not all the time, at least.

“Stark?”

“...Give me a minute.”

There was a mixture of wonder and… regret? Maybe wistfulness? In Loki’s voice as he said, “You really did triumph over this, didn’t you?”

“Yeah,” Tony said, nodding. “Hell, the pod saved my life today. The armor really was toast.”

Tony couldn’t read the look that crossed Loki’s face then, but the mage closed his eyes, and a moment later, he was standing beside him, only a little taller than Tony. The same difference as usual.

“Had to keep that advantage, huh?” Tony teased. 

“Always,” Loki said, smiling for the first time since he’d reappeared. 

“Well, now that you’re down here. Wanna see what I did with the shop?”

They walked through the glass doors and over to the nearest piece of floor-level track, Tony talking all the while about his newest projects and how they were progressing, waving to indicate various things he’d adapted to new uses. The train took them on a full circuit of the workshop, past cars and armor and various adapted workstations, past the picnic spot over the door, and to the main desk, with its elegant house and garden. Loki admired the cypresses, and Tony looked out at the view with comfortable pride. 

“I could never have imagined all this,” Loki said. 

“I made it work,” Tony replied. “At first, it was because I had to, but I really could get used to this, you know.” He looked at Loki sidelong, thinking of everything that he’d discovered over the past few days. About Loki, and about himself. “Thing I’ve been missing most,” Tony told him, “is company my own size. And hey, if you’re gonna hang around.”

Loki stared at him, frowning. “You would stay like this, submit to my magic that holds you apart from the world of humans? You would be at my mercy.”

Tony sucked on his teeth for a moment before answering. “A lot of people have thought that about me. If I’ve proved anything here it’s that I wouldn’t be. I get up again. I rebuild.”

“How can you be so stupidly fearless.” Loki shook his head, and Tony couldn’t quite parse the look in his eyes. It was angry and hard, but also somehow soft and liquid.

“Why does it make you so angry?” Tony asked, squinting curiously at him. “Why do you care so much?”

“I don’t,” Loki said, avoiding looking at him, keeping his eyes on the landscape of the workshop. 

Tony stepped closer to him, cupping his elbow with one hand and pulling him gently to face Tony “Funny thing,” he said. “You’re a bad liar, Loki Silvertongue.”

Loki made a small, desperate noise, and then he was kissing Tony, hard and passionately.

Tony had not begun the afternoon expecting to be eaten alive by the god of mischief, at least not quite this way, but he got on board pretty damn quick and kissed back, twining a hand in Loki’s hair and angling his head to make the kiss smoother, softer, but even deeper. He tasted like smoke and storms, like the hint of a fire nearby on a cold day.

It was a long few minutes before they broke apart to breathe, temples resting together and wrapped in each other’s arms

“You can’t stop me from being Iron Man,” Tony warned. “That’s never gonna work out for you. Hasn’t worked out for anyone before. Not enemies, not lovers. ‘Cause both have tried.”

“I understand,” Loki murmured. “And I believe we can… compromise.”

Tony smirked fondly. “Hell, let's give it a shot.”

“I never intended to tell you,” Loki said, holding tight to him. “I never realized you felt the same.”

“Neither did I,” Tony admitted with a breath of a laugh. “But, well. You know how you can go a while without something just fine but the minute you realize you can’t have it it’s all you can think about?”

The grave look on Loki’s face reminded Tony that Loki had been avoiding him for weeks, and then believed he was dead.

“Did you miss me so much?” Loki asked.

“Yeah, you. But also just, this. Holding another person. And kissing them.”

“Ah,” said Loki, humor coloring his voice. “Only kissing? Nothing more?”

“Mmh. Well.” Tony pulled their bodies closer together, leaned in to nose the line of Loki’s jaw and smell him, leather and sweat, alienness and familiarity. “And. Touching someone. Knowing them inside and out.”

“That does sound desirable,” Loki said, nearly whispering.

“Great,” Tony said. “C’mon, let’s take this inside.”

Tony led Loki to the silk-upholstered sofa, pushing him to sit and then climbing to straddle his lap. Loki looked up at him with something like awe. And.

Was that a little sliver of misgiving?

“Hey,” Tony said, looking Loki in the eye. “I’m okay. I’m good with this. Are you okay?”

“Is it me you crave,” Loki asked carefully, “or is it that I have made myself the only convenient person?”

Oof. That was another one of those questions he didn’t want to think about. Like the thing Pepper had said about enemies. But again, Loki hadn’t been one of those, not for real, for a long time now.

This question still needed an answer. Tony thought, then sighed.

“Listen, I’m not the best at saying the romantic thing, or having a real grown up relationship. And honestly, it’s a little hard to tell right now how much of what I feel is the circumstances, and how much is… just you. But I missed you. And here’s the thing.” He bit his lips as he thought about how to say this. “Knowing someone is a head trip. Knowing you, that goes double. Sometimes that’s frustrating but most of the time it’s fucking amazing. I can’t predict anyone. ‘Swhy I work with machines, ones I built, ones I programmed. I can’t predict you, yeah, but I get you. I get you, on a level I don’t get anyone else.”

Loki raised his eyebrows, looking doubtful. “Even Doctor Banner?” he asked.

Tony laughed. “Fuck, I don’t get how he can be so patient with people. He’s smart but he’s an enigma outside my specialty. Can’t even get a handle on his base encoding, let alone whatever language he’s written in. You, I can read. Can’t see the whole picture yet, but that just makes me want to read more.”

“You admire him, though,” Loki argued.

“Oh, sure. We can talk science, which is great. But we don’t  _ get _ each other. We’d drive each other nuts. He thinks I’m an adrenaline junkie.”

“Aren’t you?” Loki asked, reaching out and letting his fingers brush the arc reactor where it shone through the thin spider-silk shirt. “Aren’t you drawn to me because I am dangerous?”

Tony shivered.

Loki was dangerous. Maybe the most dangerous person Tony had ever known. A powder keg of things masked, hidden, set aside, things volatile and dangerous. Tony wanted to see it all go up in flames. Creation, destruction - Tony had always flirted with the boundary between those.

Some times more literally than others.

“Maybe,” Tony admitted. “Maybe it’s because I see myself in you. Maybe I’m just as dangerous and I couldn’t really love anyone who wasn’t.”

Loki hummed, gaze lifting from where his hand was now flat against the arc reactor to look at Tony’s face. He inclined his head in agreement. “I see you too,” he said.

Tony had to kiss him. 

He tasted like cold, felt hot and cold all at once to kiss, and Tony wanted to learn the ins and outs of that. He drew the edge of a thumbnail across the skin of Loki’s neck. 

Loki sighed, moaned quietly like it was being forced out of him, like the sound of ice creaking. Tony wanted to make it all come apart. His fingers dug into Loki’s shoulder, and he bent to scrape his teeth against the skin of Loki’s throat, taste the smoky alien flavor of his skin.

Loki gripped Tony hard, pulling him closer, and on a sigh, he said, “I want to see you.” There was a desperation to the way he said it that might have seemed out of sync with how close they were, all the ways they were already touching. But Tony understood.

They consumed each other in a hot blaze, tightly contained, like the burning wreck of a sailing ship. Pulled under and submerged, inevitably, inexorably. Until, exhausted, they lay tangled tightly together, unwilling to let go of each other even as they fell into a deep, still sleep.

* * *

Tony’s voice as a munchkin had been… not unrecognizable, but distinctly different. Loki had done some things to compensate for shrinking his whole vocal apparatus, but it had been impossible to keep the full timbre of the sound, even with magic. That had been the trickiest part of the videos to reproduce, and even then, people were starting to notice that there was some digital modification trickery going on.

So the theories about Tony’s absence persisted, ranging from Tony hiding the fact that he was off planet to the other Avengers covering for him having become a zombie after contracting an experimental virus.

In Tony's next press conference—held in person, life size, which would hopefully dispel the bulk of the rumors - he explained that he was experimenting with remote controlled armors, which explained the inconsistent flying over the past weeks. And also his still being alive, after Doom had taken his armor to pieces.

But the main focus of the conference had been the new MicroStark Enterprises line of robots and microtech, which were going into testing and the buzz around them was getting big.

Pepper was happy about that. And it was good being friends with her again. They worked very well together as business associates, but it was even better when they weren’t walking on eggshells around each other any more. 

Loki settled fairly smoothly into the life of the tower again, although the other Avengers made a point to come down and check on Tony every once in a while. Just in case he’d managed to make a powerful alien sorcerer angry again and had gotten himself in a new kind of pickle. 

After Clint got an eyeful of the two of them in an intimate moment, he swore loudly and told them that Tony was on his own from now on when it came to Loki.

“Well, good,” Tony replied. “Just how I like it.”

“Don’t lie,” Loki said. “You would relish the chance at a threesome, as well.” He smirked at Clint. 

There were no more Avengers incursions after that. As far as Tony could tell. Something Loki mentioned offhand made Tony think that Natasha might still be keeping an eye out. 

And Tony did his best to reassure Loki that he was the primary object of Tony’s affection, and not because Loki had backed him into a corner. In turn, Loki made an effort to talk, when he was worried about something Tony intended to do, instead of throwing a fit and causing mischief.

It worked, sometimes. Loki caused less mischief. Not none, mind you. Just less.

But that was okay, because where would a superhero be without a supervillain? 

No, that wasn’t quite the right question. The question was: Where would Iron Man be without the next challenge, the next reason to build something?

And Loki was always going to be a challenge. 

* * *

**Epilogue: a few weeks later**

It turned out that waiting for Loki to return so that Tony could be small again was almost as frustrating as the reverse. He had projects he wanted to get back to that were now difficult to see without special equipment. His cypress grove just didn't have the same effect at this scale. He couldn't just climb around in the armor like a giant climbing wall, he had to actually go down to the gym!

At least this time he was pretty sure Loki was coming back. 

He’d gone offworld for a few days, citing his need to gather magical materials for a new project. He wouldn’t say what. Tony thought he should probably find that worrying, but it mostly made him curious. And even more eager for Loki to get back than he would be otherwise. 

In the meantime, Tony stared at the maintenance suite for the microbots, knowing he could do the repairs now if he sat down with his magnifier and all the motion refining tools, but also knowing how much easier it could be if he just waited. He tapped his finger on the surface of the workstation, pouting.

No, he had other projects. Better projects.

Loki had finally started giving him hints about the space travel problem. 

He opened the theoretical modeling files with a flick of the wrist and a sigh. But then he spotted something new, and in a few minutes he was deep into a new model, trying to tune it in to something workable. 

“Working on a faster-than-light drive?” said a familiar, elegant voice from behind him. 

“Might even be getting somewhere with it,” Tony agreed. He turned and pulled Loki in with an arm around his waist. “Welcome back, gorgeous. Get everything you went looking for?”

“Near enough, for the moment,” Loki answered. He gestured at the holographic model. “How soon do you think you will be ‘getting somewhere’ with this in a more literal sense?”

Tony laughed. “No idea,” he said. “This is just one element of the puzzle, right? I think I might need a little more help. And a lot more time.”

“Good,” Loki said, and Tony heard the relief Loki tried to hide. “I have a lot of other defensive technologies I’d like to help you with in the meantime.”

“Square deal.” If space really was filled with as much danger as Loki claimed, Tony was going to make use of any advantage he could before going out there.

“What are your plans for the evening?” Loki asked.

“Nothing firm. I’d like to hear more about those defensive technologies if you’re up for it. If you wanna do something equally fun but less like work, I’m up for that too. Either way I’m thinking a little change of scenery is in order. Join me in the micropalace?”

Loki leaned in to kiss him, deep and somehow searching. 

“Hey, what’s on your mind, babe?” Tony asked, pulling back enough to look at Loki.

“I have been thinking. It isn’t right that you should have to ask, every time, to visit part of your own home.”

Tony wasn’t sure what Loki was getting at there, but he thought he might know at least one element of the puzzle. “Getting annoyed with being my ride?” he asked.

Loki narrowed his eyes. “That isn’t what this is about.”

Tony just continued to look at him steadily. “That’s not a no.”

Shaking his head, Loki said, "Stop that and look. I made you something." An object appeared in his hand, a metal device on a chain, inscribed with runes and symbols and with an asymmetrical arrangement of crystals connected by something like wiring.

"Ooh, what is it?" Tony asked.

"An amulet that will change your size when you activate it." Loki smiled, radiating smug mischief.

“Oooh!” Tony exclaimed, and took the thing, turning it over in his hands and seeing if he could tell how it was put together and how much of its mechanism he could understand. There were elements that were definitely unfamiliar, but they had patterns to them...

“You’re going to take it apart, aren’t you,” Loki said dryly.

“No!” Tony knew he shouldn’t be thinking about taking something apart when it had been a gift from a romantic partner. Especially something that was so useful on its face. But it was so  _ interesting. _ “...Maybe,” he admitted.

Loki seemed unfazed by that. “My mother gave me a clock when I was a child,” he said, “crafted by the best makers of Niflheim. It showed the motion of the realms. I took it to pieces and could not put it back together. I cried and told her I’d ruined her gift. She asked me if I’d learned anything. I’d learned many things. She told me that if I’d learned anything at all, the gift had not been ruined. I know you value knowledge over things and I would not want you any other way. This is a thing I wish you to have and it is no business of mine how you make use of it.”

“Hmm.” Tony looked at the thing, and thought of that story, and about everything he’d ever wished for when he’d snuck into his father’s workshop. “Did she help you put it back together?”

“No,” Loki said. “But I will help you remake this as many times as you like.”

“You’re going to regret saying that,” Tony warned. 

“I’m sure I will,” Loki agreed with a twist of a smile, and kissed him. That kiss was a clash of creation and destruction, where it was impossible to tell which was which. 


End file.
